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CZ liked it twice, BonkGuy bought BEM, and the founder is actually a high school student?

Foresight News

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16-year-old high school student brings CPU onto BNB Chain, BEM surges over 400% in three days.

The original title: "What is BEM, which CZ liked twice and BonkGuy bought?"
The original author: Nicky, Foresight News

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

According to GMGN market data, as of press time, BEM is priced at about $58, with a market cap of about $10 million, a 1% buy and sell fee, and cumulative fees of 60.48 BNB, worth about $43,100. The total supply is 21 million tokens, the current supply is about 170,000 tokens, and it has been listed on trading platforms including MEXC, Gate, and LBank.

This rally brought TapeOut into more people's view. TapeOut founder Blonskr is a self-described 16-year-old high school student. According to his post on August 15, he built Behemoth, the first real on-chain 4-bit processor in history on BNB Chain, composed of 2,251 NAND gates and flip-flops, with specifications comparable to the 1971 Intel 4004, and a clock that ticks with BNB Chain block production at about 2.22Hz. Subsequently, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao commented under the post, "pretty interesting. What's the use case?"

In the project's early days, the community had disputes over the founder's age and the project's feasibility. But as features such as Behemoth, the PoD question bank, circuit containers, and the on-chain Linux demo launched one after another, the community gradually began to trust the founder and TapeOut.

After that, Blonskr tried to bring the semiconductor industry's concept of "tape-out" onto the chain on BNB Chain (tape-out is the process of handing chip design blueprints to a wafer fab to manufacture real chip samples on silicon wafers), and use it to build a mining coin mechanism similar to Bitcoin mining logic but with completely different live rules, namely the token BEM.

According to the TapeOut official website, BEM's current daily network output is 7,200 tokens, equivalent to about $417,600, with 15,977 mining machines.

TapeOut's core idea is to break digital circuits down into basic components. NAND (Not-AND gate) handles the most fundamental logic decisions, while LATCH (latch) is used to remember a small piece of state—one is responsible for "computing," the other for "remembering." Users use these components to design circuits on a canvas, and once confirmed, the design is formally created on-chain in a process called "tape-out." Tape-out consumes the NAND, LATCH, and other components required by the design, generating a circuit NFT that can be used and transferred. Once components are consumed, they can no longer be resold as the original parts, and the cost is thereby written into the circuit itself.

The mining mechanism is called "Proof of Design" (PoD). It does not use hashpower as the basis for block production, but instead looks at circuit design quality. Mining machines that comply with protocol rules can receive BEM according to the distribution rules of the corresponding mining pool. Current public data shows that BEM has a hard cap of 21 million coins, halving approximately every four years, with no pre-mine and no team reserve, and issuance comes only from the mining contract. At present, only circuits on two processors, Behemoth and TapeOut, are eligible for mining.

In the hashpower formula widely adopted by the community and tool sites, the base weight of a mining machine is the number of NAND and LATCH it actually consumed during tape-out. Each NAND or each LATCH consumed counts as 1 point of weight, which is then multiplied by the processor coefficient—6 for Behemoth and 1 for TapeOut. Only the design that secures the optimal first-of-its-kind solution for that problem can obtain the full design premium; copying the official template usually yields only the production cost with no premium. This means that for the same problem and the same consumption of 3 NAND, the weight burned on Behemoth is 6 times that burned on TapeOut.

If you want to mine one BEM per day, according to TapeOutScan data, the current optimal blueprint cost for minting with transistors is about 2.75 BNB (about $1,970), while buying directly on the secondary market requires 3.28 BNB (about $2,350), corresponding to static payback periods of 36 days and 43 days, respectively, and the BEM token needs to absorb daily production sell pressure and maintain its current price. But if the price rises, the payback period will increase.

The part of this mechanism most similar to Bitcoin mining is the monetary policy, not the mining mechanism. Bitcoin has a cap of about 21 million coins, and in the early days it also produced about 7,200 coins per day, after which it halved roughly every four years. BEM has carried this set of numbers over almost exactly: the same ceiling, the same initial daily output, and the same four-year halving rhythm. But the on-site rules are completely different. Bitcoin is a race, producing a block about every ten minutes, with the entire reward going to the winner, and mining machines must continuously consume electricity; if shut down, they produce no coins the next day. BEM distributes allowances by share, with a fixed amount of about 7,200 coins per day, and all verified mining machines split it according to weight, with no ongoing electricity costs. Costs occur only at the moment of tape-out deployment, that is, the cost of purchasing NAND and LATCH, after which the circuit automatically produces tokens.

This difference also determines BEM's daily sell pressure structure. Bitcoin miners need to continuously pay electricity bills, and when the price falls below the cost line, some miners will shut down their machines, causing supply to automatically contract. BEM miners' costs are already sunk at the time of tape-out deployment. As long as the circuit is still there, there is almost no marginal cost to claiming BEM every day, so miners are more inclined to keep selling to recover their principal. If buying pressure is less than daily output, the price will remain under pressure.

Recently, well-known trader Bonk Guy bought about $71,600 worth of BEM at $33.41, and has now made a profit of about $46,000, a return of about 64.26%. In the fomo wallet, he said: "BEM is one of the most interesting new experiments i've seen on BNB Chain in ages," and mentioned that the project was built by a 16-year-old genius and has already received two interactions from CZ. He also mentioned that BEM is gaining close attention among Chinese-speaking and BNB whale communities.

On September 15, CZ posted: "Would be cool to see someone make 'immortal fruit flies' on BNB Chain." Blonskr then quoted the tweet, encouraging all TapeOut developers to take action, and said he would devote his time to TapeOut's launch platform.

Previously, crypto blogger CUPID published an article introducing the use of NAND and LATCH in the TapeOut ecosystem to express a simplified neural reflex control model for fruit flies in circuit form, arguing that cyber immortality is a direction worth seriously exploring.

From a broader perspective, TapeOut's innovation is not "yet another on-chain mining machine," but rather breaking computation back down into its most fundamental components and then turning these components on-chain into consumable, verifiable, ownable, and composable productive capital. After the circuit container goes live, circuits can have their own on-chain accounts, hold assets, and initiate transfers and contract operations through the current holder. Transferring the circuit NFT means the new holder also gains control of its capacitance and the remaining assets within it. The official team has publicly demonstrated an on-chain Linux demo, where processor instructions are executed through BNB Chain transactions and machine state is stored on-chain. The community has compiled 43 project and resource entry points, covering games, tools, circuit component research, and data dashboards.

However, BEM currently remains a mining coin mechanism. Daily output is about 7,200 coins. Without stable external demand and protocol revenue, buyback and burn can hardly offset miner selling pressure. On September 14, the BEM contract renounced all management rights. Since then, it cannot be upgraded, paused, or have any questions and answers modified, and the total supply and output curve are permanently fixed.