After the launch of Ordinals on the Bitcoin mainnet in January last year, the new token standard BRC-20 based on Ordinals quickly became the hot topic of the market in 2023. However, this newly-born Bitcoin ecosystem may now face a split in 2024…
(Previous Summary:
The New Dark Horse of BRC-20: What is CBRC-20 that community FOMOed? An inventory of ecological tokens)
(Background Supplement:
“Non-leading” inscriptions, meme coins, is there still room for growth?)
Table of Contents:
BRC-20 Consensus Split Sparks New Internal War
Domo Criticizes UniSat in a Post
Exchange Takes Sides, Attracting Market Attention
Software engineer Casey Rodarmor created the Ordinals protocol on the Bitcoin mainnet in January last year, allowing users to create unique NFTs on the smallest unit of Bitcoin, Satoshi (SAT). Soon after, based on the Ordinals protocol, Domo developed a new token standard called BRC-20.
The essence of BRC-20 is to facilitate token issuance and transfer by writing text on SAT. At that time, BRC-20 had no support from any exchanges and had to be minted on self-built nodes. However, based on the BRC-20 protocol, UniSat Wallet, an open-source wallet developer, established “BRC20-Swap,” which allows users to provide liquidity and trade. Now, this new Bitcoin ecosystem composed of Ordinals, BRC-20, and UniSat is facing a split…
Further reading:
UniSat Officially Launches brc20-swap Mainnet: Initially Only 14 Assets Available, Withdrawals May Be Delayed
According to Wu’s blockchain analysis, in October last year, Domo, the founder of BRC-20, made an important decision. Because the update of the Ordinals protocol was not beneficial to the development of BRC-20, Domo chose to “freeze” the indexing standard of BRC-20 at Ordinals 0.9 version. This also means that BRC-20 will no longer follow the upgrades of the Ordinals protocol.
On the other hand, UniSat Wallet decided to follow the upgrade of Ordinals and develop its own BRC-20 indexing. This has led to the existence of two different BRC-20 indexing standards on the Bitcoin network, similar to the multiple incompatible indexer versions of Dogecoin’s DRC-20. However, this fork may pose significant challenges to the unity and interoperability of BRC-20.
Yesterday (3rd), Domo, the developer of BRC-20, expressed opposition to the upcoming fork of the BRC-20 protocol proposed by UniSat Wallet. Domo believed that updating the BRC-20 protocol too hastily was a reckless move that would ignore peer indexing and may harm the BRC-20 user community.
He emphasized that the errors that appeared in the updates of Ordinals 0.8 and 0.9 versions highlighted the complexity of integrating new updates into the BRC-20 standard. Domo further pointed out that these changes are not safe to integrate without robust testing, coordination, and verification infrastructure, and criticized UniSat’s fork proposal as an attempt to seize control of the BRC-20 protocol.
In response, UniSat later clarified strongly that their so-called “fork” is actually a “split,” aiming to separate the assets of BRC-20 0.9 version from the upcoming Ordinals upgrade, forming “different collections with different rules but still existing on the same physical blockchain.”
UniSat stated that they will follow the Ordinals Jubilee upgrade to ensure that BRC-20 remains on Ordinals without being split into an isolated protocol. Additionally, the developers revealed that a new whitepaper on enhancing the BRC-20 protocol will be released on January 31.
With the internal rift in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the exchanges’ support for BRC-20 assets, especially on mainstream platforms such as OKX and Binance, will attract more attention. Currently, the widest consensus seems to be focused on UniSat, as OKX reached a cooperation agreement with UniSat in May last year, while the source of Binance’s indexing is still unclear.
Further reading:
OKX Launches BRC-20 Browser, Solving the Problem of “Withdrawal and Deposit” for Exchanges?
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