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Original editor: Biteye core contributor Crush
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Super complete guide: Eight types of websites take you through the BRC-20 ecology
01 Innovations in the Bitcoin network
As digital gold, Bitcoin's market capitalization accounts for more than half of the cryptocurrency market. Although Bitcoin has always played the role of a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system", most of the excitement in the current encrypted world is based on smart contracts. Compared with "world computers" like Ethereum, the Bitcoin network lacks the function of smart contracts, so its Applications are limited.
However, the innovation of Bitcoin has never stopped, such as the emergence of technologies such as Lightning Network and Stacks. At the end of last year, Bitcoin core contributor Casey Rodarmor created the Ordinals protocol, which introduced the concepts of Ordinals and Inscriptions, giving birth to the first NFT of the Bitcoin network.
Combining the two upgrades of Segwit (2017) and Taproot (2021) utilizing the Bitcoin network, Ordinals enables the recording of arbitrary data (images, videos, text, etc.) on the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing the creation of digital artwork or NFT become possible.
Since then, the minting volume of Bitcoin NFT has soared, and people are paying more and more attention to the new possibilities of the Bitcoin network. More projects such as Yuga Labs and Magic Eden have also joined this ecosystem, and new builders are building Bitcoin. future.
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First BTC NFT on Ordinals
02 Questions of intuition
We are very familiar with NFT on Ethereum, but the Bitcoin network lacks smart contracts, why can NFT be issued?
Rodarmor's solution is simple, engrave NFT on BTC.
The total amount of Bitcoin is 21 million, and the smallest and indivisible unit is sat (Satoshi), 1 BTC = 100 million Satoshi.
Rodarmor proposed the theory of ordinals. Ordinals are numbered from 0 according to the order in which Satoshi was mined. For example, the serial number of the first Satoshi in the first block is 0, and the serial number of the second Satoshi is 1. The serial number of the last Satoshi is 4999999999, so each Satoshi has an ID attribute.
In this way, each satoshi is artificially assigned a serial number between 0 and 2, 100, 000, 000, 000, 000, and then they are connected with other information such as pictures, text, video and codes, As a result, each Satoshi is indivisible, non-homogeneous, and traceable.
This is equivalent to giving Bitcoin the native ability to create NFTs.
These unique satoshis can be "inscribed" with any content, such as text, images, videos, etc., creating "inscriptions". An inscription is the concept of metadata in a Bitcoin NFT, stored on-chain in a taproot script.
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https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html
Because the inscription is on the chain, it cannot refer to the content off the chain, unlike the Ethereum NFT that is indexed through the IPFS or AWS under the chain, so it is truly decentralized NFT.
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https://ordinals.com/inscription/ea 57 c 0 ae 99 af 317 ef 24 c 3812 f 0 f 804010 c 27 a 9 f 14 c 9 dd 9106 eac 7 cb 05 eb 3 b 038 i 0
03 What is Brc 20?
Now that NFT can be issued through Ordinals, can tokens also be minted through Ordinals?
So on March 8, 2023, domo proposed to use the Ordinals inscription in JSON data format to deploy token contracts, coin minting, and transfers.
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https://domo-2.gitbook.io/brc-20-experiment/
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https://domo-2.gitbook.io/brc-20-experiment/
Deploy Tokens
Take the deployment token as an example, you only need to modify it in the txt text according to the format below.
First, change "ordi" to the name of the token;
Then modify the maximum supply of tokens, change "max: 21000000" to the desired amount, such as "max: 9999";
Finally, change the maximum amount allowed for each transaction in other people's mint tokens as needed, for example, modify "lim: 1000" to "lim: 11" and so on.
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https://domo-2.gitbook.io/brc-20-experiment/
Mint Token
If someone else wants to mint the token you just issued, modify it according to the format below, and then mint it into an inscription.
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https://domo-2.gitbook.io/brc-20-experiment/
transfer tokens
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https://domo-2.gitbook.io/brc-20-experiment/
Obviously these BRC-20 tokens are far from the utility value of ERC-20 tokens, just a way of storing a script file in Bitcoin and using that file as a way to give token meaning to satoshis, and then allow them from The way one user transfers to another.
04 Data Interpretation
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https://brc-20.io/
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https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/brc 20
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https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/brc 20
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https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/brc 20
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https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/brc 20
05 Opportunities and risks
opportunity
As the cryptocurrency with the largest market value, Ordinals has opened a new door to the Bitcoin ecology, but if one percent of Bitcoin funds flow into its ecology, it can open up an imaginary space with a very high ceiling.
The NFT on the BTC network, or the BRC-20 token, is fundamentally different from the NFT and FT under the ERC standard we are familiar with.
Its advantage is that inscriptions are directly stored on the Bitcoin L1 chain. Compared with ERC standard NFT, many metadata are stored on IPFS, Arweave, or even a centralized Web2 server platform. NFT or inscription tokens on the BTC network It will be more decentralized, and the inscriptions cannot be deleted or modified, which adds a more eternal meaning than diamonds.
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https://docs.ordinals.com/overview.html
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https://twitter.com/binance
But in fact, the participation threshold of the Ordinals ecology is relatively high, and most people are still very unfamiliar with the Bitcoin network, so there are not many actual participants in the discussion. Take some outstanding leading tokens as examples:
$ordi - The market value is 210 million US dollars, the name is the first 4 letters of the ordinals protocol, the first token of the brc 20 protocol, the currency holding address: 7381.
$nals - The market value is 18 million US dollars, the name is the last 4 letters of the ordinals protocol, and the currency holding address is: 1767.
$insc - The market value is 4 million US dollars, the name is the first 4 letters of the inscription, and the currency holding address is: 936.
$pusy - The market value is 900,000 US dollars, the name comes from pussy, it is said to be promoted by @XEN_Crypto, the currency holding address: 605.
$piza - The market value is 10 million US dollars, the name comes from the story of buying 1 pizza with 10,000 bitcoins (the bitcoin pizza festival will come on May 22), the currency holding address: 1045.
$pepe - with a market value of 16 million US dollars, the same name as the meme coin, and the fourth deployed BRC-20 token, holding address: 3418.
$hash - The market value is 2.4 million US dollars. The name comes from the hash algorithm of Bitcoin. The currency holding address: 634.
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https://unisat.io/brc 20
risk
As an investment, liquidity exit issues need to be considered. The infrastructure of the BRC-20 ecosystem is weak, there is no liquid exchange, the security of token transactions cannot be guaranteed, and there are still many defects.
Due to the absence of smart contracts, the potential financial application value of these FT/NFT is also greatly limited. But the new upsurge is attracting a large influx of developers. UniSat announced that the code is open source, which means that a large number of infrastructure tools and facilities are coming. At the same time, with the access of exchanges such as OpenSea, transactions will be smoother.
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https://www.ordz.games/
Although BRC-20 is experimental, it has opened up a new world of Bitcoin ecology for people and has great potential, just like when Crypto Punk first came out, everyone did not understand it. But at the same time, the risks are huge, requiring more developers, more infrastructure and applications, otherwise, once the fomo sentiment passes, it is easy to be stranded on the beach of liquidity.
In short, the BTC ecology or Ordinals ecology represented by BRC-20 is a high-risk and high-reward opportunity, and BRC is not a real standard, and there is still a lot of room for expansion in the future. The following related tool websites are attached for everyone to maintain focus on.
