The crypto money market is wondering what the BRC-20 standard and its related altcoins are.
BRC-20 is an experimental version of ERC-20 on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, which is on the Ethereum network. It allows programmers to create and send equivalent tokens over the Ordinals protocol.
Tokens can be associated with satoshis and then exchanged or swapped with others just like any other token.
The Ordinal protocol is protocols on individual satoshis stored directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. This Bitcoin protocol can have a maximum size of 4mb in any format. These allow users to create and send fungible tokens via the Ordinals protocol.
Ordinals are numbers assigned to a list of inputs (for example, first, second, third, etc.). In the context of Bitcoin, ordinals are the identifiers/serial numbers of each satoshi or sat's, the smallest unit of each Bitcoin.
Each BTC consists of 100 million satoshis. In other words, there are 2 quadrillion satoshis in 19.1 million bitcoins in circulation. The sequence number of each satoshi will be a number between 0 and 2×1010, depending on when it is mined.
The current market value of BRC-20 tokens is recorded as approximately $120 million. This corresponds to an increase of approximately 6 times compared to last week.
BRC-20 vs. ERC-20
Key differences include that BRC-20 is published on the Bitcoin blockchain (using PoW) and has fewer features due to the lack of smart contract support in Bitcoin.
For now, the majority of BRC-20 tokens are meme tokens like "ordi", "pepe" and "meme". Over 8,500 different tokens have been minted so far.
The BRC-20 standard was created by a trader about 2 months ago as a trial run for fungible tokens on Bitcoin. Previous attempts in this area such as the Colored Coins protocol (2012) have failed due to high transaction fees and limited programmability.
BRC-20 vehicles are still primitive. Wallets such as Unisat have suffered vulnerabilities that indicate the technological risks currently associated with these tokens. Meme tokens are already known to be high risk. Breast tokens on BRC-20 are even more risky.
The creator of the protocol initially stated that these tokens would be worthless, but the token named "ordi" reached $4 per piece, providing astronomical returns to the first holders.
We can see that in the last 10 days, the number of BRC20 transactions has greatly exceeded the number of normal transactions. They may even over-engage the BTC network and cause problems soon. The number of BRC-20 mints is also increasing parabolic.
It is not investment advice.
