Original Author: Cookie, BlockBeats
The annual "meme season" is here again.
This is a "season" of anxiety. The stories of wealth and freedom seem to be happening constantly, and the FOMO emotion of being afraid of not being able to "get on the bus" can overcome all unknown fears.
This is a "season" of self-doubt. Players who like to look at the fundamentals to buy Token are prone to self-doubt, and those who work hard to support projects are prone to self-doubt. Manufacturing stories in batches, colliding successfully in quantity, everything is so "weightless". How confusing it is to work so hard to operate a project to build success in multiple directions.
Actually, there is nothing new under the sun. It's just that this time there is a new "casino" - the BRC-20 on the Bitcoin mainnet.
Suddenly, it's on fire
Various communities have been swept by BRC-20 Token-related content. "What is BRC-20?", "What is the difference between BRC-20 and Bitcoin NFT?", "How to buy?", "How to open trading permissions in UniSat's trading market?"... These questions are constantly being asked , and people keep answering. On Twitter, it seems that overnight all KOLs are looking at BRC-20, and various BRC-20-related Threads appear at an alarming rate.
I flipped through the chat records of various WeChat groups, and the fiery emotions seemed to burn my computer's CPU:
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(Image credit: @coolish)
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Recently, the growth of inscriptions has been almost entirely supported by text types, and both Mint and Transfer of the BRC-20 Token rely on the creation of new text type inscriptions
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Changes in BRC-20 transaction volume as a percentage of all Bitcoin transactions
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$ordi price action from April 26th to April 30th (Image credit: @Ca1aba93 )
As the only BRC-20 trading market currently on the market, with BRC-20 Mint and Deploy functions, UniSat is extremely lively. Starting from April 29th, UniSat has been stuck by the "charge" players from time to time. Since the number of BRC-20 Tokens that each inscription can represent is usually set to 1,000, 10,000 Mints means that 10 text-type Bitcoin NFTs must be minted. Players are afraid of missing the "Golden Dog" in the primary market. Raise the Gas crazily and submit Mint transactions to UniSat continuously.
The transaction fee rate data on the chain also reflects how enthusiastic the players are. Before April 20, the rate of 1 - 2 sat/vB was stable and accounted for more than 50% of the daily rate, and the rate of 20 - 30 sat/vB was already "stuck". But in recent days, we have even seen 100 - 125 sat/vB rates with a certain percentage.
It is hard to imagine that before the BRC-20 exploded like a Zibo barbecue, the popularity of the entire Ordinals agreement has actually slowed down. The "out of the circle" this time is as magical as the "two heavens of ice and fire".
In the early morning of April 9, Beijing time, the number of inscriptions exceeded the 1 million mark. In the following week, the number of new inscriptions added every day was not large, and even less than 10,000 appeared. At that time, the spaces in the Chinese circle and even the entire Ordinals circle were almost all faces of acquaintances. The daily space in the Chinese circle was about 30-60 people. Almost all the friends who chatted every night were familiar with each other, and there were few new faces.
During the period April 9th - April 20th, there was a periodic trough in the daily increments of inscriptions. (As shown in the red box of the blue histogram in the figure below) Before April 23, there was only one case where the proportion of BRC-20 transaction fees on the day exceeded the proportion of non-BRC-20 inscription transaction fees. Most of the time, non-BRC-20 inscription transaction fees account for a much larger proportion than BRC-20 transaction fees. (As shown in the red frame of the black and gray histogram in the figure below)
On April 23, UniSat's BRC-20 market was launched, but it was closed urgently in the early morning of April 24 due to business loopholes. It then reopened on April 27.
On April 24, OKX announced that its wallet plugin has supported the display/transfer of Bitcoin NFT. On the same day, Binance’s official Twitter also released a tweet saying “Ordinals, made simple”. On April 27, the OKX Chinese official launched a vote for "Do you want OKX to support BRC-20?", and gave a brief introduction to the Ordinals protocol and BRC-20 Token in the same tweet. The imagination of CEX entering Bitcoin NFT began to have a clear outline, and the rise of $ordi began to be noticed, and gradually "out of the circle".
In fact, until now, I have not been able to figure out which point most directly detonated the frenzy of BRC-20. Too fast, really too fast.
"Actually, a month ago, we almost gave up."
When various KOLs began to lead the majority of players to reflect deeply on "Why didn't you catch BRC-20?", xiyu, Huan. The old players who are familiar with the reason of tutorial output or development are very calm during this wave of explosion.
In February, xiyu discovered the relevant content of Ordinals from Twitter and began to study in depth. At that time, Bitcoin was entering a rebound market, and felt that Ethereum had no new stories to tell, so I started to look back and study Bitcoin. xiyu also designed a BRC-20 defectcash system, which can be used as an inscription stable token in the future, and this stable token can be added to the system. Huan.sats learned about Ordinals from Decrypt's article on the second day after the Ordinals protocol went live on the mainnet and started research.
Ivan isBRC-1155 The developer of , may also be the most ceremonial of the three. After being deeply fascinated by the Ordinals agreement, in order to express my love, I specially selected a MAYC with an orange background to commemorate my encounter with Ordinals.
As I've mentioned in past articles, they never envisioned that BRC-20 would develop so quickly.
Ivan was not very optimistic about BRC-20 at first, but with the mentality of "it's okay to try it" and support for "innovative experiments" in the Ordinals ecosystem, Mint bought some $ordi. That night, because of $ordi Mint, a bunch of inscriptions that had not been confirmed by the network were released on UniSat. Seeing such excitement, Ivan raised the miner's fee again. When talking about the development speed of BRC-20, Ivan recalled the casting situation of $meme at that time. $meme is the second deployed BRC-20 Token, with a total of 99,999 tokens, and each inscription can only represent 1 token of $meme. Ivan said that at that time everyone was still muttering, 99999 inscriptions, can they really be finished?
The sudden influx of so many new players into the Ordinals ecosystem is a good thing or a bad thing? All three believe that the advantages and disadvantages coexist, but the overall advantages outweigh the disadvantages. On the positive side, the Ordinals ecology has been "out of the circle" very successfully because of BRC-20, and more people have learned about Bitcoin NFT. As for the disadvantages, the angles of the three are different.
Xiyu believes that the popularity of BRC-20 has crowded out the space for picture (art) Bitcoin NFT. (As we mentioned above, from April 24 to May 3, a total of 1,815,157 new inscriptions were added. Among them, 1,787,862 new text-type inscriptions were added, and only 3122 new image-type inscriptions were added. , accounting for only 0.172% of the number of new inscriptions.) But at the same time, xiyu also said that this is not actually a "disadvantage". Although he thinks this is an unhealthy status quo, he believes that the market will repair itself.
This point of view of xiyu happened to be discussed in the chat with Blueberry. I made Bitcoin Pizzas and Blueberries made PixelBirds Sparrow. Before, we felt that the emergence of the Ordinals protocol gave small and medium-sized creators a stage with higher visibility. At the same time, because there is no smart contract, the project launch is more friendly to creators. Here may become a small but exquisite independent workshop, where small and medium-sized creators will grow together like independent game developers in the game circle. But now, the "Art Salon" is empty. At the same time, the skyrocketing gas fee and the sluggish cultural atmosphere also temporarily make more creators take a wait-and-see attitude towards entering Bitcoin NFT.
On April 24th, the eve before $ordi was about to "get out of the circle", the first BRC-20 fraud case with an amount of more than one million was thundered on this day.
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The process of swallowing coins and the subsequent discovery that the two are the same person
With the launch of UniSat's BRC-20 trading market and Ordswap's guarantee service on the official Discord, the security of BRC-20 transactions has been greatly improved.
The story of $nals: I am a dirt dog, can you buy it or not?
This year's May Day holiday is busy for Null. He squatted in front of the computer screen 25 hours a day with high intensity, waiting like a patient hunter for the new BRC-20 "Golden Dog" to appear, and then frantically Mint.
Through the screen, I can feel the pride he felt when he told me the name of the dish with his fingertips and shared his achievements.
"$piza, $moon, $8888, $lowb, $#gua, $ngmi, $noot, $gmgn, $noce... some people don't remember if it was the May Day holiday, but it was recently, and I won’t be doing interviews until they’re sold out. You just say, isn’t brother a BRC-20 legend?”
In addition to lurking in a bunch of BRC-20-related discussion groups, he also stared at the BRC-20 board on UniSat, mainly observing the two indicators of Holder quantity and Mint speed. Once he finds his favorite target, such as Toekn with a bunch of unconfirmed Mint transactions, he will immediately consider whether to raise Gas and charge. There will also be some situations where the low Gas pull creates the illusion of FOMO, so in terms of decision-making, he pursues speed and at the same time takes caution.
Adhering to the principle of "selling for free and earning forever" and the Token screening experience accumulated in actual combat, Null gained a lot during the May Day holiday. He was initially attracted to the Ordinals ecology because of the picture-type inscriptions, and now he still insists on only leaving his true love to pictures.
"BRC-20 suddenly came up like this... We are all old players, are you worried? Anyway, as long as I don't have a pattern, I won't panic. $ordi I will hold it, and sell the others as soon as they should be sold, less Sell everything you earn. Can the wind of the capital plate blow to the Bitcoin mainnet to move forever? It doesn’t exist.” In the usual chats, Null gave me the impression that he was a carefree person, but this time he was actually a little sad. "In the beginning, I just wanted to collect some pictures. After all, on Bitcoin, we have talked about this N times. It's cool, and it's not expensive. So many people came at once, and with interest, things started It's getting complicated... Wherever I am a leek, I will attack the earth dog, I just hope that the people here can stick to their original aspirations of idealism."
BRC-20 has a very high popularity, and the player base is not too large, so the consensus building is not new but relatively easy. Everyone has a clear goal. It doesn't matter whether the story is good or not, but whether it can make money is important. Traffic, or influence, acts as a leverage during takeoff, which is greater than ETH.
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$ordi + $nals = ordinals
Once Mint was all done, the price of $nals took off at breakneck speed. According to the transaction data on UniSat, $nals completed a 20-fold increase in about 12 hours after Mint was fully completed.
"Golden dogs" like $nals seem to be all over the place. Randomly find a few popular BRC-20 Tokens on UniSat, all of them are flying, but the takeoff posture is slightly different.
$pepe, close to 10 times
$moon, 5 times more
$utxo, up more than 5 times from its nadir
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Ordinals are inseparable from a pen of $utxo
Why is there a "meme season"?
Huan.sats believes that if someone makes money, someone must lose money. Overheated speculation may cause many new players to face losses. At the same time, BRC-20 is not efficient enough as a ledger system itself, and there is a risk of being replaced by better technology (for example, the author of the agreement pointed out in the official document: Would also like to mention that the taproot enabled concept of issuing assets on the bitcoin blockchain is not novel, and Taro is unequivocally a better solution), the more popular it is, the more attention and discussion should be paid to the problems of the technology itself, so that the BRC-20 and even the entire Ordinals ecology will become more and more good.
Ivan believes that "out of the circle" is just the beginning, and what is more important is how to keep new players in the Ordinals ecosystem, instead of slowly losing "people" as the possible future popularity fades. What needs to be considered is, does BRC-20 bring more and better project parties into the ecology for construction? If not yet, how can this be done? After all, only high-quality projects can continuously inject increments into the Ordinals ecology in the future.
In addition to sharing their own views, xiyu and Ivan also shared with me their observations on the attitudes of other Ordinals veteran players and even Bitcoin veteran players.
According to xiyu's observations, veteran players' attitudes towards Ordinals are roughly as follows:
1. Exploring the ability to transfer part of the things on the Ethereum to the Bitcoin chain is also considered a contribution;
2. No objection, toss and toss as you like, as long as it is not in the form of a fork;
3. Hold your own bitcoins. If you do well, bitcoin holders will benefit as well;
4. Don't try to cheat my bitcoins with pictures and data.
As for BRC-20, xiyu said that most old players do not express their views on BRC-20, which itself may also represent an attitude.
The result of Ivan's observation is that the old Ordinals players' attitude towards BRC-20 is "polarized". Some people think that BRC-20 is a Token protocol system. Although the support in transaction, bookkeeping and other aspects is still relatively backward, they firmly believe that there will be better supporting infrastructure to solve the problem in the future, and they are optimistic about the future development of BRC-20. On the contrary, some believe that BRC-20 has deviated from the center of gravity, and building BRC-20 on Bitcoin with strong security and decentralization is putting the cart before the horse, and it is purely superfluous.
Regarding the technical shortcomings of BRC-20 itself, both xiyu and Ivan emphasized the problem of "centralization dependence".
Ivan: From a technical point of view, it is difficult for BRC-20 to achieve a smooth transaction process and a decentralized accounting system through inscriptions. After all, when the transaction activities on the chain become more frequent, the complexity of the transfer will increase the amount of data extremely large and difficult to track. At present, it is still necessary to rely on a single centralized project party to implement the relevant accounting system, and this is a systemic risk. of. However, the community generally prefers not to transfer the Token of the BRC-20 protocol to different chains for more convenient transactions and applications in the form of mapping or side chains, but only accepts the realization of related transactions on the native network of Bitcoin. operation to highlight its uniqueness. However, with the current technical support, in order to achieve the above more user-friendly operation process, this means that the BRC-20 protocol will need to sacrifice the decentralization of Bitcoin, and instead welcome the support that relies heavily on centralization.
There is nothing special about BRC-20 from the perspective of funds when it comes to each Token, but BRC-20 as a whole has two narratives that are very attractive to increase:
1. Counterfeit tokens on the "Bitcoin Mainnet";
2. Natural "ownership". Judging from the reactions of various communities, this is very appealing to new players. Since BRC-20 Token deployers have no way to reserve any Token for themselves, if they want to control the market, they either spend Gas to Mint like ordinary players, or spend money to collect chips from ordinary players. Players feel that frying the "earth dog" on ETH is speculation, and frying BRC-20 is also speculation. Instead of being cut off by the "earth dog" on ETH by reserving the mouse warehouse of chips, instead of playing the so-called "value investment" project and watching CEX, institutions and market makers eat meat, it is better to "turn over and do it" on BRC-20 Owner".
Coinciding with the "meme season", ETH has appeared again such a myth of getting rich like $PEPE, and the potential possibility of BRC-20 has made players FOMO even more. Big CEXs such as Binance and OKX will list BRC-20 Token, right? It is still so difficult to get started now, there are still many players who will enter the game in the future, right?
As for why there is a "meme season"? Every time the "meme season" appears, it is "the right time, place and people". For example, $Squid "Squid Token" two years ago, because it appeared on TV and was dubbed "community self-government" from the ashes of Rug Pull, flew into the sky again, and after detonating market sentiment, $People failed to auction the constitution. This is "Tianshi", often boring and lack of hot market, will be the time for meme Token to perform. The "geographical advantage" is very simple. This is the world of Crypto. There are many precedents for the increase of tens of thousands of times. The story of "meme speculation can be free" has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. As for "Renhe", the trend has emerged and emotions have been ignited. Is it really important to find logic on top of this?
It's just that the "infection" of meme always has a little "emotion". Like the following cases:
"Meme seasons" come and go like the wind, year after year. It’s just that in every “meme season”, players are always prone to have a sense of “anxiety about the end of the world”-how many times are there still chances of getting rich a hundred times or a thousand times? With eager desire, BRC-20 seems to have become a "land of hope". But, who wins and who loses? Is this game on Bitcoin really "the victory of retail investors" and "the last chance"?
