A 16-year-old high school student moved the CPU onto the BNB Chain, and BEM rose over 400% in three days.

Written by: Nicky, Foresight News

From September 12 to 14, the mining reward token BEM of the circuit design protocol TapeOut Protocol on the BNB Chain rose from $20 to a peak of $101.9, an increase of over 400%.

According to GMGN market data, as of the time of writing, the price of BEM is approximately $58, with a market cap of about $10 million and a trading fee of 1%. It has accumulated a fee of 60.48 BNB, valued at about $43,100, with a total supply of 21 million tokens and a current supply of about 170,000 tokens. It has already been listed on exchanges like MEXC, Gate, and LBank.

This round of price increase has brought TapeOut into the view of more people. The founder of TapeOut, Blonskr, claims to be a 16-year-old high school student. In a post on August 15, he mentioned that he created the first real four-bit processor Behemoth on the BNB Chain, consisting of 2,251 NAND gates and flip-flops, with specifications comparable to Intel 4004 from 1971. The clock follows the block generation timing of the BNB Chain, approximately 2.22Hz. Subsequently, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng commented on the post, "pretty interesting. What's the use case?"

In the early stages of the project, the community had debates regarding the founder's age and the feasibility of the project. However, as functionalities like Behemoth, the PoD question bank, circuit containers, and on-chain Linux demonstrations have been launched one after another, the community has gradually begun to trust the founder and TapeOut.

Afterward, Blonskr attempted to move the concept of "tape-out" in the semiconductor industry (which is the process of handing chip design blueprints to a foundry to produce real chip samples on silicon) onto the chain, and based on this, he constructed a mining mechanism for tokens BEM that is similar to Bitcoin mining logic but has completely different on-site rules.

According to TapeOut's official website, BEM currently produces 7,200 tokens daily across the network, equivalent to approximately $417,600, with 15,977 mining machines.

The core idea of TapeOut is to decompose digital circuits into basic components. NAND gates perform the most fundamental logical judgments, while LATCHs (latches) are used to remember a small amount of state, one is responsible for "counting" and the other for "remembering." Users design circuits on a canvas using these components, and upon confirmation, the design is officially created on the chain, a process known as "tape-out." The tape-out consumes components like NAND and LATCH needed for the design, generating usable and transferable circuit NFTs. Once the components are consumed, they cannot be resold as original parts, and the cost is thus incorporated into the circuit itself.

The mining mechanism is referred to as "Proof of Design" (PoD). It does not base the block generation on computing power but rather on the quality of the circuit design. Mining machines compliant with the protocol can obtain BEM according to the distribution rules of the corresponding mining pool. Current public data shows that the total supply of BEM is capped at 21 million tokens, roughly halving every four years, with no pre-mining or team reserves; additional issuance comes solely from mining contracts. Currently, only circuits on Behemoth and TapeOut processors qualify for mining.

In the computational formulas commonly used by the community and tool stations, the weight of a mining machine is fundamentally based on the real number of NAND and LATCH consumed during the tape-out; each consumed NAND or LATCH counts as 1 point in weight, multiplied by the processor coefficient—Behemoth is 6, and TapeOut is 1. Achieving optimal original designs allows for complete design premiums, while copying official templates usually only incurs base costs, without premiums. This means that for the same problem, using 3 NANDs will give a weight on Behemoth that is 6 times that of using TapeOut.

If one wishes to mine one BEM in a day, according to TapeOutScan data, the current cost of creating using transistors is about 2.75 BNB (approximately $1,970), while direct purchase on the secondary market requires 3.28 BNB (approximately $2,350), with corresponding static payback periods being 36 days and 43 days respectively, and the BEM token needs to withstand daily selling pressure to maintain the current price. However, if the price increases, the payback time will extend.

This mechanism resembles Bitcoin mining mostly in terms of monetary policy, rather than mining mechanisms. Bitcoin's cap is approximately 21 million tokens, and in its early days, it also produced about 7,200 tokens daily, halving roughly every four years. BEM has almost exactly copied this setup: the same ceiling, the same initial daily output, and the same four-year halving rhythm. However, the on-site rules are entirely different. Bitcoin is a race, producing a block approximately every ten minutes, with rewards given entirely to the winner; mining machines must continuously consume power, and if they shut down, they won't produce coins the next day. BEM distributes allowances based on shares, with a fixed daily output of approximately 7,200 tokens, divided among all verified mining machines according to weight, without continuous electricity costs. Costs only occur at the moment of tape-out deployment, namely the purchase cost of NAND and LATCH, after which the circuit automatically produces tokens.

This difference also determines the daily selling pressure structure for BEM. Bitcoin miners need to continually pay electricity costs; when prices fall below the cost line, some miners will shut down machines, resulting in automatic supply contraction. BEM miners have their costs already sunk at the moment of tape-out deployment; as long as the circuit is operational, collecting BEM daily incurs almost no marginal cost, thus miners are more inclined to continue to sell to recover their principal. If buying pressure is lower than daily output, the price will continue to be under pressure.

Recently, well-known trader Bonk Guy bought about $71,600 worth of BEM at $33.41 and has since made a profit of about $46,000, yielding an approximately 64.26% return. He stated in his FOMO wallet, "BEM is one of the most interesting new experiments I’ve seen on BNB Chain in ages," mentioning that the project is built by a 16-year-old prodigy and has gained two interactions from CZ. He also noted that BEM is gaining close attention among Mandarin-speaking and BNB whale communities.

On September 15, CZ posted, "Would be cool to see someone make 'immortal fruit flies' on BNB Chain." Blonskr promptly quoted the tweet, encouraging all TapeOut developers to take action and stated that he would dedicate time to the launch platform of TapeOut.

Previously, crypto blogger CUPID had published a post introducing the use of NAND and LATCH within the TapeOut ecosystem to achieve simplified control models for fruit fly neural reflexes, suggesting that cyber immortality is a direction worth exploring seriously.

From a broader perspective, TapeOut's innovation is not about "another on-chain mining machine," but about breaking down computation into its foundational components and then enabling these components to transform into consumable, verifiable, ownable, and combinable production capital on the chain. Once circuit containers are online, circuits can have their own on-chain accounts to store assets and be operated by the current holder for transfers and contracts. When transferring circuit NFTs, the new holder also gains control over their capacitance and remaining assets. The official has already showcased on-chain Linux demonstrations, where processor instructions are executed through BNB Chain transactions, and the machine state is preserved on the chain. The community has organized 43 project and resource entry points covering games, tools, circuit component research, and data dashboards.

However, currently, BEM is still a mining token mechanism. With a daily output of about 7,200 tokens, if there is no stable external demand and protocol revenue, buyback and burn will be hard to offset the pressure from miners selling. On September 14, the BEM contract relinquished all management rights, thus it cannot be upgraded, paused, or modified with regard to any questions and answers, with total supply and output curves permanently fixed.