Why does UniSat continue to delay the open-source release of the indexer code? Is it for industry development or for profit considerations?

The BRC-20 exchange and indexer UniSat recently completed the Jubilee upgrade. However, the community has questioned why the indexer code has not been fully open-sourced, raising concerns about controlling commercial interests. In response to these queries, UniSat officially addressed the issue in a post yesterday, stating that their decision was made out of responsibility.

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UniSat Completes Jubilee Upgrade

UniSat has successfully completed the Jubilee upgrade of BRC-20. However, its open-source project, which has been progressing slowly since May, has come under scrutiny from the community. This is a significant issue for a leading project valued at over $3 billion, and the UniSat team has responded officially.

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UniSat stated that their top priority was to minimize risks during the Jubilee upgrade. With the successful completion of the upgrade, they will now push forward with more open-source projects.

UniSat Yet to Open Source Code Raises Concerns

The team mentioned that the delay in open-source development progress was influenced by historical and practical factors.

Historical Factors

The team did not anticipate that the functionality of BRC-20 would become a focal point for the Bitcoin community within a few months, leading to strong criticism of UniSat's temporary centralized support for BRC-20.

When developing BRC-20 internally, the team treated it like any other feature, gradually integrating it into multiple existing products, followed by continuous testing and deployment, with an existing development process to complete.

Initially, UniSat did not develop the BRC-20 indexer as a standalone product, so it now needs to be extracted from the product code to create independent software, requiring significant refactoring. Similar to the criticism faced when developing Windows 95 due to excessive centralization, extracting the core part into the open-source Linux kernel while ensuring the seamless operation of Windows 95 demonstrates the complexity of this task.

Practical Factors

Another layer of complexity is the team's desire to improve user experience with the optimal solution, involving extensive decentralized coordination of various servers. They aim to build an open-source indexer as a lightweight solution to run on low-level hardware for all users, not just developers.

To achieve a lightweight indexer, significant streamlining and optimization of the existing architecture are required.

Healthy Open-Source Architecture Strengthens Ecosystem

UniSat Bears Significant Responsibility

UniSat sincerely hopes for a healthy, open-source BRC-20 indexing model to create ample opportunities for different teams to build other services based on the BRC-20 protocol.

For example, at the Ordinals Summit last September, the team introduced a modular framework based on BRC-20, and then implemented native BRC-20 transaction functionality, brc20-swap, using this framework. If a healthy, open-source model had existed at that time, UniSat would not have needed an additional two months to invent black modules and white modules, enabling all users to withdraw and demonstrate advantages.

Open-sourcing modular approaches can be used for other BRC-20 applications, such as higher-level applications for lending or stablecoins, rapidly expanding various functions of BRC-20. With numerous modules continuously emerging from different teams, BRC-20 will continue to grow and be ubiquitous.

UniSat's open-sourcing is not an evasion of responsibility; on the contrary, it is a decision to undertake the heavy responsibility of supporting the development of the BRC-20 protocol.

BRC-20 Requires Ongoing Development

The team acknowledges the need for further discussion and time within the community to reach consensus on BRC-20 related standards, such as minor optimizations like transaction attack proposals or significant improvements like supporting the module architecture of BRC20-swap.

They also hope that community members will pause to consider whether they want to elevate BRC-20 to tools for higher-level applications in the future, or merely remain stagnant as one of many historical mysteries.

UniSat Unexplained Concerns About Holding Interests

In the rapidly evolving market, UniSat has indeed made significant contributions to the development of the BRC-20 protocol and provided a good user experience with their products, supporting their vision.

However, as the BRC-20 protocol has become a $3 billion decentralized project, every step of UniSat will undoubtedly be closely scrutinized. The delay in decentralizing the indexer naturally leads the community to speculate about holding commercial interests, given the significant benefits involved. Whether the community will buy into this explanation remains to be seen.

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