[Blockchain Science_Bitcoin] What is Bitcoin BRC-20?

The crypto market in May 2023 was ignited by the meme sector, and the Bitcoin ecological BRC-20 Token rose sharply, attracting extensive discussions in the industry.

According to data from Dune Analytics, BRC-20 related transaction (minting, transfer and deployment) fees reached nearly 1,265 BTC on May 29, setting a record high. The discussion of BRC-20 in major communities has also been increasing.

So, what is the recently popular BRC-20?

01.What is BRC-20?

BRC-20 is a Token issuance standard on Bitcoin. It stipulates the name, circulation, transfer and other functions of Token issued on Bitcoin. It was created by community enthusiast @domodata on March 8, 2023. BRC-20 was founded The next day, March 9, more than 30,000 "inscriptions" were minted, of which nearly 27,000 were text-type "inscriptions."

The creator of BRC-20 emphasized that this is just an experiment, which aims to test whether tokens can be minted and transferred through the Bitcoin NFT Ordinals protocol, and whether it can promote the "fungibility" of Bitcoin.

ordi is the first BRC-20 Token to be deployed. Each minting is limited to 1,000, with a total supply of 21 million. ordi has increased more than 100 times since its issuance.

Currently popular BRC-20 Tokens include pepe, punk, bayc, domo and other Memecoins. OTC transactions are active. Due to the attraction of speculative value and wealth effect, a large number of users download BTC wallets and enter the BTC ecosystem.

02.What is the principle of BRC-20?

Before talking about BRC-20, let’s first talk about the two concepts of Bitcoin NFT protocol Ordinals and inscriptions.

Because the total number of Bitcoins is 21 million, and one can be subdivided into 100 million satoshis (satoshi is sat, the smallest unit of Bitcoin), the cumulative total is 2100 trillion satoshis.

The Ordinal protocol was launched by Bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor on January 21, 2023. It is a protocol used to number sats and assign a unique serial number to each sat.

Through the Ordinals protocol, writing information to each sat, such as text, pictures, audio and video information, generates an inscription, that is, the inscription is created by writing content to each sat using the Ordinals protocol.

Domo, the founder of the BRC-20 protocol, believes that the Ordinals protocol can not only be used to issue NFTs, but also be used to issue homogeneous tokens.When the inscription is Mint according to a unified protocol standard (JSON data format), a homogeneous Token can be generated. This method of issuing Tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain is called BRC-20.

Therefore, the inscriptions on the Bitcoin NFT are burned with different information. The inscriptions on the tokens marked on the BRC-20 are all text data (Text) in a unified JSON format.

In BRC-20, developers can create and issue Tokens on the blockchain through the Ordinal protocol. The inscription is also used as the accounting ledger of BRC-20 Token, which can be used to track each token transfer.

03. Summary

In general, BRC-20 has attracted widespread attention from the entire cryptocurrency industry. The emergence of BRC-20 has not only brought income to block producers, but also brought new vitality to the entire industry. By using the functionality of Ordinal, new solutions are provided for the transfer and management of digital assets.

However, due to market enthusiasm and attention, the future of BRC-20 remains uncertain. What do you think about the future development of BRC-20? Welcome to leave a message in the comment area.