In this bullish and bearish market, BTC is still hovering around the $30,000 mark. At this time, the emergence of BRC20 has brought new vitality to the entire BTC market.

Through careful research, we have glimpsed some consensus narratives that have led to BRC20’s popularity, including but not limited to:

  • Tamper-proof on the chain

For some blockchain people, chain-based tamper-proofing is a core feature. Compared to the ERC standard, which puts the token metadata on the chain and stores the actual content elsewhere, BRC20 truly achieves full chain-based storage, storing the complete token in the BTC block. However, each block has a capacity of only 4M.

  • ERC20

BRC20 is similar to ERC20 and is an experimental Bitcoin alternative token standard created by Twitter user @domodata on March 8, 2023. BRC20 uses the Ordinal inscription of JSON data to deploy token contracts, mint, and transfer. Tokens minted based on BRC20 will support storage and trading on wallets and exchanges on the BTC network.

  • MEME Hot

Tokens issued based on BRC20 cannot interact with smart contracts, which means they cannot participate in DeFi projects and can only be considered MEMECoin at best. ORDI, as the first Token of BRC20, has been widely sought after by the market. According to the latest news, Gateio has launched Ordinals (ORDI) at 10:00 today (May 8), with an opening price of $1.9 and a current price of $13.17.

[Hot market]

In fact, ORDI’s phased success is also due to Arbitrium’s first MemeCoin AIDOGE, which ignited the first fire in the Meme market.

Since AIDOGE became popular, the entire MEMECoin market has been driven by FOMO, especially PEPE, which has made a comeback. The more than 10-fold increase has caused the market to fall into a carnival.

MEMECoin also occupied the homepage headlines of major encrypted media platforms, and Twitter's hot search terms were dominated by various MEMECoins for many consecutive days.

But as the heat fades, market sentiment gradually calms down, and the drawbacks of BRC20 are also revealed by various experts. It is time for us to calm down and think about whether BRC20 is a flash in the pan or has real value.

【Return to rationality】

For a long time, BTC was once known as "digital gold" and its function is to hedge risks. What is risk hedging? That is, as long as it is safe, BTC will not work. When is it a risk hedging? When there is a national war or a market collapse.

In other words, under normal circumstances, no one will use BTC, just hoard it. But we have always emphasized that the value of a network comes from the number of users, so BTC is a pure outlier in the development of the encryption industry, that is, its value comes from consensus, not application.

So imagine that once the consensus collapses, the entire BTC price will inevitably collapse. Therefore, the current priority of the BTC network is to build applications and attract more users. The emergence of BRC20 is based on the trend in 2023, using the wealth-making effect of MEMECoin to attract more users to the BTC ecosystem.

Of course, if the BTC ecosystem only stops at BRC20, then the lack of stamina will soon come with the drawbacks of the BTC network and the shortcomings of BRC20 itself.

From another perspective, the emergence of BRC20 has brought freshness to the entire crypto industry. According to NFTGO data, the entire market is still in a sluggish state, and most players suffer losses.

The emergence of BRC20 has brought new life to the NFT industry. Currently, Yuga, Digi, and Degods have all released NFTs on the BTC network. At the same time, the MagicEden NFT market invested by Paradigm has launched a Bitcoin NFT zone, and the top NFT transaction volume in 30 days is as high as 20 BTC. The NFT transaction volume in the ETH market is only about 30 BTC after conversion.

The significance of BRC20 to the BTC ecosystem and even the crypto industry goes far beyond this. Just as the emergence of ERC20 brought about the prosperous EVM ecosystem today, BRC20 is just a vanguard from the BTC ecosystem, exploring the crypto ecosystem for the BTC network and declaring BTC’s determination to enter the sinking market application.

The current crypto industry is far from the Token War of the past. Application is the core of victory. In the future, we may see BTC "blooming on the old tree" and enter the next golden age of BTC.