The first principles trend started with Bitcoin, then it relaunched with XEN, and later on with ordinals and inscriptions. First principles are taking over the blockchains, and they are now taking force on Pulsechain. The EVMBitcoin, or e.BTC, launched recently on Pulsechain, and it’s already making strides with almost 15,000 holders and 696k transfers. It’s just a simple mint function designed to be like Bitcoin but it’s a powerful concept and that people want.
What is EVM Bitcoin
E.BTC is a smart contract launched on Pulsechain. It follows the first principles of blockchain, like decentralisation, censorship resistance, trust through consensus, and permissionlessness. The contract is immutable, has no admin keys, and it’s just a mint function designed to emulate the supply mechanism of Bitcoin on the Pulsechain blockchain. The token was launched fairly, which means that it started at supply zero with no allocation to the founder or anyone else, and the supply is being minted by anyone who connects the wallet to the contract and executes the transaction. There’s no official website and no whitepaper. There are only community members.
The token was developed by @chenieder80. Other developers jumped in to contribute to the effort and built a front-end E.BTC Minting Tool on Pulsechain (notyourmomsbitcoin.com) where it’s possible to connect the wallet and mint e.BTC. Another developer built a miner in Python, which goes over the 25 trx/mint limit: https://x.com/xenpub/status/17579759486143818
Looks like fun 😉 https://t.co/9XhGBVZzz4
— ⓧ Cyphereus Prime 🟧🦇🟦 (@mrJackLevin) February 15, 2024
The miner is fully configurable, supports auto-wallet creation, is optimised for gas, and has auto transaction management.
How does the mint function work
EBTC is a proof-of-payment protocol where the function counts the number of executed transactions. Here’s the minting logic:
- The function calculates the current reward based on the initial reward divided by 2 raised to the power of the current halving. The initial reward is set to 50 tokens with 18 decimals.
- It checks if it’s time for a halving. If the total number of mints is a multiple of 210,000 (which is the number of blocks in each halving period for Bitcoin), it increments the current halving.
Similarly to Bitcoin, eBTC is subject to the halving mechanism, which ensures that the supply is disinflationary and that the total minted tokens don’t exceed 21 million. The halving occurs every 210,000 mints. In PoW systems, difficulty adjustment is a feature that regulates how hard it is to find a new block. The eBTC protocol doesn’t have any difficulty with adjustment like in Bitcoin, so it’s to be expected that the mining of the entire supply won’t take much time.
The only difficulty that is met is that of the PLS gas fee. Less and less tokens are released after each halving, so the cost of minting increases proportionally. Moreover, in cases where a lot of people come to mine eBTC at the same time or when the traffic on Pulsechain increases, the cost of gas also increases, making eBTC more expensive to produce.
The initial reward for minting eBTC was set to 50 eBTC tokens with 18 decimals. It already went through 2 halvings and is currently minting 6.25 eBTC per transaction.
The game theory of minting would assume that when minting eBTC will cost as much as the gas fee of the transaction, the minting should stop, and buying the token from the market will make more sense. At that point, the price of eBTC will increase, and it will be profitable to mint it again and so on until the entire supply is minted out.
eBTC is an example of how a simple code based on first principles and good game theory can create a vibrant community.