After the launch of the Bitcoin mainnet in January last year, the new token standard based on Ordinals protocol, BRC-20, quickly became the hot topic of the market in 2023. However, the newly emerged Bitcoin ecosystem in 2024 is now facing a split…
(Introduction:
BRC-20, the dark horse of the community’s FOMO, what is CBRC-20? An inventory of ecological tokens)
(Background:
“Non-leading” inscriptions, meme coins, is there still room for growth?)
Table of Contents
BRC-20 Consensus Split Sparks New Internal Strife
Domo Criticizes Unisat in a Post
Exchanges Take Sides and Attract Market Attention
The protocol Ordinals, created by software engineer Casey Rodarmor on the Bitcoin mainnet in January last year, allows users to create unique NFTs on the smallest unit of Bitcoin, Satoshi (SAT). Soon after, Domo developed a new token standard based on the Ordinals protocol, 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 by setting up nodes. However, based on the BRC-20 protocol, the open-source wallet developer UniSat Wallet created “BRC20-Swap” for 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: Only 14 Assets Available Initially, 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 updates to the Ordinals protocol were 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 no longer follows the upgrades of the Ordinals protocol.
On the other hand, the UniSat wallet decided to follow the upgrades of Ordinals and develop its own BRC-20 indexing. This led to the emergence of two different indexing standards for BRC-20 on the Bitcoin network, similar to the multiple incompatible indexer versions of Dogecoin’s DRC-20. However, this fork could pose significant challenges to the unity and interoperability of BRC-20.
Yesterday (3rd), Domo, the developer of BRC-20, posted an article expressing opposition to the upcoming fork of the BRC-20 protocol proposed by UniSat Wallet. Domo believes that the rushed update of the BRC-20 protocol is a reckless move that will ignore peer indexing and may harm the BRC-20 user community.
He emphasized that the errors 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 also strongly clarified that their so-called “fork” is actually a “split” aimed at separating the assets of BRC-20 0.9 version from the upcoming Ordinals upgrade, creating “different collections with different rules, but still existing on the same physical blockchain.”
UniSat stated that they will follow the Ordinals Jubilee upgrade to confirm that BRC-20 remains on Ordinals without being split into an isolated protocol. In addition, developers revealed that a new whitepaper enhancing the BRC-20 protocol will be released on January 31.
With the internal fissure in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the future, especially after the listing of BRC-20 assets on mainstream exchanges such as OKX and Binance, the stance of these exchanges will attract more attention. Currently, the most widespread consensus seems to be focused on UniSat, as OKX and UniSat reached a partnership as early as May last year, while the source of Binance’s indexer is still unclear.
Further reading:
OKX Launches BRC-20 Browser, Solving the Issue of “Deposit and Withdrawal” for Exchanges