As of May 3, 2023, the Bitcoin blockchain has witnessed a staggering 3.35 million Ordinal inscriptions, and a new experimental token standard known as “Bitcoin Request for Comment,” or BRC20, has garnered substantial attention in the past week. With 10,487 BRC20 tokens built using Ordinals and a swelling market capitalization exceeding $95 million, this new development has the crypto world buzzing.
The Bitcoin community is abuzz with conversations surrounding the BRC20 token standard after its introduction by a pseudonymous developer named Domo in March. BRC20 tokens leverage the Ordinals protocol, enabling creators to mint fungible crypto assets onchain with ease. To create a BRC20 coin, individuals need to encode a JSON data object containing critical token information. Like an ERC20 token contract on Ethereum, this data would encompass fundamental details such as the token’s name, symbol, and total supply.
EVERYTHING Ethereum can do IS BEING done on BTC w/ blockspace & custom indexers
First Liquidity Pool for DEX on Bitcoin L1 w/ BRC-20
NO ONE thought it possible
Posting the SAME info that UNISWAP DEX would post to make a transaction & reconciling it later w/ indexer pic.twitter.com/1IBuQ8e7A4
— trevor.btc @ NYC (@TO) May 3, 2023
The impressive issuance of over 10,500 BRC20 tokens — alongside the surge of Ordinal inscriptions surpassing 3 million — has led to a backlog of over 200,000 unconfirmed transactions in Bitcoin’s mempool. A comprehensive list of these 10K+ BRC20 coins can be found at ordspace.org, displaying each token’s value in US dollars. Currently standing at a remarkable $95 million, the BRC20 token economy has witnessed tokens skyrocketing with quadruple-digit gains.
Notable examples of these tokens include ordi, $OG$, PEPE, MEME, PUNK, SHIB, and DOMO. The ordi market cap today is hovering above $52 million; the $OG$ token market cap sits at $7.9 million, and the PEPE BRC20 coin’s market valuation rests at $8.3 million as of May 3, 2023. This rise of BRC20 tokens and Ordinal inscriptions, predominantly comprised of text, has driven Bitcoin’s average and median-sized fees to soar.
Data from bitinfocharts.com on May 3, 2023, reveals that the average onchain Bitcoin transaction fee is 0.00025 BTC or $7.05 per transaction, equating to roughly 0.0000011 BTC per byte. Additionally, the median-sized transfer fee is 0.00012 BTC or $3.46 per transaction, according to metrics compiled by bitinfocharts.com. The flood of BRC20s and Ordinal inscriptions has reignited a heated debate over whether the fungible tokens and non-fungible token (NFT) concepts built on BTC justify confirmation alongside financial transactions.
What are your thoughts on the growing trend of creating fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain using the Ordinals protocol? Do you think the surge in BRC20 tokens justifies the high transaction fees and the backlog of unconfirmed transactions in Bitcoin’s mempool? Share your opinions with us in the comments section below.
Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 7,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.
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