The Atomicals protocol does not force any changes to Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin is still used, with no sidechain, no second layer, no centralized index, and no project control. All data comes from transaction history and is built into UTXO.
The protocol index service originated from "ElectrumX" (github.com/atomicals/atomicals-electrumx). ElectrumX itself is an open source Bitcoin index server. It has been widely used for a long time. Thanks to its efficient data structure and caching mechanism, it can quickly query the transaction history, transaction data or balance check of users in the Bitcoin network. However, with the development of Bitcoin infrastructure, more high-quality alternatives have emerged. The original author kyuupichan finally gave up ElectrumX's support for Bitcoin three years ago. Arthur, the author of the Atomicals protocol, decided to keep and improve it here.
When Atomicals was born, it forked an atomic version of ElectrumX (atomicals-electrumx) and made major modifications to it, enabling it to efficiently query the operation records defined by the atomic protocol in each address, namely the colored records.
This is what we now call the Atomicals indexing service, and many updates during the protocol development process are also to improve and maintain this indexer.
All "dyed" behavior marks are fully recorded in every Bitcoin transaction. All data is stored on the main network, there is no third-party database, and all transaction data can be 100% verified by the client.
During the application of the index, everyone is allowed to freely build and run private nodes or public nodes. Currently, there are about 6 public nodes for everyone to use (operated and maintained by major infrastructure platforms within the ecosystem).
Of course, even if no index nodes are running, all Atomicals objects will be 100% permanently located on the Bitcoin mainnet, without the need for additional consensus maintenance. Anyone can rebuild an ElectrumX node at any time without any barriers.
In this atomic universe of the Bitcoin ecosystem, all order has been fully pre-regulated.
Atomicals provide the simplest, most flexible, and most secure way to create digital objects in Bitcoin.
