Original author: Cookie
Original source: BlockBeats
The annual "meme season" is here again.
This is a "season" filled with anxiety. Stories of financial freedom seem to be happening constantly, and the FOMO emotion of not being able to "get on the bus" can defeat all unknown fears.
This is a "season" of self-doubt. Players who like to buy coins based on fundamentals are prone to self-doubt, and project owners who work hard to support projects are prone to self-doubt. The story of mass production is successful in quantity, everything is so "lightweight". How confusing it is to work so hard to run a project to build success in all aspects.
In fact, there is nothing new under the sun. However, this time there is a new "casino" - BRC-20 on the Bitcoin mainnet.
Suddenly, it became famous
All communities are swept by content related to the BRC-20 token. "What is BRC-20?", "What is the difference between BRC-20 and Bitcoin NFT?", "How to buy it?", "How to open trading permissions in UniSat's trading market?"... These questions are constantly being asked, and People kept answering. On Twitter, it seems that overnight all the KOL’s eyes are on BRC-20, and various BRC-20 related threads appear at an alarming rate.
I casually browsed through the chat records of various WeChat groups, and the fiery emotions seemed to burn up the CPU of my computer:
There are even traces of BRC-20 on Xianyu:
(Image source: @coolish)
From April 24 to May 3, a total of 1,815,157 new inscriptions were added. Among them, 1.787862 new text-type inscriptions were added, and only 3,122 new picture-type inscriptions were added. The Bitcoin NFT market can be said to have completely turned into a BRC-20 market. However, just a month ago, everyone's attention was still on "pictures".
Recently, the growth of inscriptions has been almost entirely supported by text types, and both Mint and Transfer of BRC-20 tokens rely on the creation of new text type inscriptions.
On April 30 and May 1, the number of BRC-20 transactions even accounted for half of all Bitcoin transactions, and handling fees accounted for more than 30%. Currently, the total handling fees generated by BRC-20 transactions have exceeded 135 BTC.
Changes in the number of BRC-20 transactions as a proportion of all Bitcoin transactions
The price of $ordi, the first BRC-20 token to be deployed, soared like a rocket. In a defunct BRC-20 OTC group, there was still $ordi for sale on April 19 with a unit price of $0.088 (1 piece = $88). By April 25, in Ordswap’s Discord OTC, the selling price of $ordi was almost above the unit price of US$0.65 (1 piece = US$650). As of May 7, the unit price of $ordi on the UniSat market has exceeded US$8 (1 piece = US$8,000). Since the amount of each pending order on UniSat is limited to 0.0005 BTC – 0.05 BTC, it is already difficult for players to buy more than 300 $ordi in one transaction on UniSat.
$ordi price action from April 26 to April 30 (Image source: @Ca1aba93)
As almost the only BRC-20 trading market currently on the market, and with BRC-20 Mint and Deploy functions, UniSat is extremely lively. Starting on April 29, UniSat has been experiencing lags from time to time due to "charging" players. Since the number of BRC-20 tokens represented by each inscription is usually set to 1,000, Mint 10,000 means minting 10 text-type Bitcoin NFTs. Players are afraid of missing out on the "golden dog" in the primary market. , madly raising Gas and constantly submitting Mint transactions to UniSat.
The handling rate data on the chain also reflects how enthusiastic players are. Before April 20, the rate of 1-2 sat/vB stably accounted for more than 50% every day, and the rate of 20-30 sat/vB was already very "stuck". But in recent days, we have even seen a certain percentage of 100 – 125 sat/vB rates.
It is hard to imagine that before BRC-20 exploded like a Zibo barbecue, the popularity of the entire Ordinals protocol had actually slowed down. This time "out of the circle" is as magical as "the two heavens of ice and fire".
In the early morning of April 9, Beijing time, the number of inscriptions exceeded the 1 million mark. In the following week, the number of new inscriptions added every day was not large, and there were even less than 10,000 new inscriptions. At that time, the Space in the Chinese circle and even the entire Ordinals circle were almost full of familiar faces. The daily Space in the Chinese circle was about 30-60 people. Almost all the friends I chatted with every night were familiar with each other, and there were few new faces.
During the period April 9-April 20, the daily increment of inscriptions experienced a periodic low. (As shown in the red box of the blue histogram in the figure below) Before April 23, there was only one situation where the proportion of BRC-20 transaction fees on the day exceeded the proportion of non-BRC-20 inscription transaction fees. Most of the time, non-BRC-20 inscription transaction fees account for much more than BRC-20 transaction fees. (As shown in the red box of the black and gray histogram in the figure below)
On April 23, UniSat’s BRC-20 market was launched, but it was shut down in the early morning of April 24 due to business vulnerabilities. It then reopened on April 27.
On April 24, OKX announced that its wallet plugin now supports displaying/transferring Bitcoin NFTs. On the same day, Binance’s official Twitter also posted a tweet saying “Ordinals, made simple”. On April 27, the OKX Chinese official Twitter launched a vote for "Do you want OKX to support BRC-20?" and gave a brief introduction to the Ordinals protocol and BRC-20 tokens in the same tweet. The imagination of CEX entering Bitcoin NFT began to have a clear outline, and the rise of $ordi began to be noticed, and it gradually "came out of the circle".
In fact, until now, I have not been able to figure out which point most directly triggered the BRC-20 craze. Too fast, really too fast.
"Actually, we almost gave up a month ago."
When various KOLs began to lead the majority of players to deeply reflect on "Why didn't you catch BRC-20?", xiyu, Huan.sats and Ivan have been active in the circle since the official launch of the Ordinals protocol, and because of their opinions/ Veteran players, who are well-known for the reasons for tutorial output or development, seemed very calm during this wave of explosions.
xiyu discovered Ordinals-related content on Twitter in February and began to research it in depth. At that time, Bitcoin was entering a rebound, and I felt that Ethereum had no new stories to tell, so I started to look back at Bitcoin. Xiyu also designed a cash system based on the flaws of BRC-20, which can later be used as an inscription stable token and added to the system. Huan.sats learned about Ordinals from Decrypt’s article the day after the Ordinals protocol was launched on the mainnet and started researching it.
Ivan is the developer of BRC-1155 and may be the most ritualistic among the three. After being deeply fascinated by the Ordinals protocol, in order to express my love, I specially selected a MAYC with an orange background to commemorate my encounter with Ordinals.
As I've mentioned in past articles, they never expected the BRC-20 to develop so quickly.
Ivan was not very optimistic about BRC-20 at first, but with the mentality of “it doesn’t hurt to give it a try” and his support for “innovative experiments” within the Ordinals ecosystem, Mint bought some $ordi. That night, a bunch of inscriptions that had not yet been confirmed by the network appeared on UniSat because of the $ordi Mint. Seeing such excitement, Ivan paid more mining fees to raise funds. When talking about the development speed of BRC-20, Ivan recalled the casting situation of $meme at that time. $meme is the second BRC-20 token to be deployed, with a total of 99,999 tokens. Each inscription can only represent 1 $meme. Ivan said that everyone was still murmuring in their hearts at that time, could 99,999 inscriptions really be finished?
There are so many new players in the Ordinals ecosystem all of a sudden. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? All three believe that there are pros and cons, but overall the pros outweigh the cons. On the plus side, the Ordinals ecosystem has been very successful "out of the circle" because of BRC-20, and more people have learned about Bitcoin NFTs. As for the disadvantages, the three perspectives are different.
xiyu believes that the popularity of BRC-20 has crowded out the space of picture (art) Bitcoin NFT. (As we mentioned before, from April 24 to May 3, a total of 1,815,157 new inscriptions were added. Among them, 1,787,862 new text-type inscriptions were added, and only 3,122 new picture-type inscriptions were added. ), accounting for only 0.172% of the number of new inscriptions.) But at the same time, xiyu also said that this is not actually a "disadvantage". Although he thinks this is an unhealthy status quo, he believes that the market will repair itself.
This point of view of xiyu happened to be mentioned in my chat with Blueberry. I made Bitcoin Pizzas and Blueberry made PixelBirds Sparrows. We previously felt that the emergence of the Ordinals protocol gave small and medium-sized creators a stage with higher visibility. At the same time, because there are no smart contracts, project launch is more friendly to creators. This may become a small but beautiful independent workshop, where small and medium-sized creators can grow together like independent game developers in the gaming circle. But now, the "art salon" is deserted. At the same time, the skyrocketing gas fees and the sluggish cultural atmosphere have temporarily caused more creators to hold a wait-and-see attitude towards entering Bitcoin NFT.
On April 24, the night before $ordi was about to “leave the circle”, the first BRC-20 fraud case worth over one million broke out on this day.
A BRC-20 OTC group owner named Bzz.eth was revealed to have taken a large order on April 24 (opening a small account claiming to buy at a high price, making excuses to cancel the transaction after the seller transferred $ordi, and then using invalid The Transfer inscription puts the responsibility on the seller and refuses to return it), goes back on its word and raises the guarantee fee, and passes different prices between the buyer and seller to absorb the difference. On March 20, BlockBeats conducted an interview with the owner of the guarantee group. At that time, he revealed that the average transaction volume was 300U, and the average number of transactions per day was 20.
The process of swallowing coins and the subsequent discovery that the two were the same person
With the launch of UniSat's BRC-20 trading market and the launch of Ordswap's guarantee service on the official Discord, the security of BRC-20 transactions has been greatly improved.
$nals’ story: I’m just a local dog, why don’t you buy it?
This year’s May Day holiday was a busy one for Null. He squatted in front of the computer screen at high intensity for 25 hours a day, waiting like a patient hunter for the new BRC-20 "Golden Dog" to appear, and then Mint like crazy.
Across the screen, I could feel the pride he felt when he clasped his fingers to share his achievements with me like he was telling me the names of his dishes.
"$piza, $moon, $8888, $lowb, $#gua, $ngmi, $noot, $gmgn, $noce... Some of them I can’t remember if they were taken during the May Day holiday. Anyway, it was recently, and some others haven’t been I won’t do the interview after I sell it. Just tell me, is he a BRC-20 legend?”
In addition to lurking in a bunch of BRC-20-related discussion groups, he also stared at the BRC-20 board on UniSat, mainly observing the two indicators of Holder number and Mint speed. Once he finds his favorite target, such as Toekn who has a bunch of unconfirmed Mint transactions, he will immediately consider whether to increase the Gas and charge. There will also be situations where the gas level is very low, creating the illusion of FOMO. Therefore, when it comes to decision-making, he pursues speed while also taking care of caution.
Adhering to the principle of "sell and you will always make money" and the accumulated experience in token screening, Null gained a lot during the May Day holiday. He was originally attracted to the Ordinals ecosystem because of the picture-type inscriptions, and now he still insists on leaving his true love only to pictures.
"BRC-20 suddenly started acting like this... We are all old players, are you not panicking? Anyway, as long as I don't have a pattern, I won't panic. I will hold $ordi, and sell the rest if I need to, no matter how much profit I make." Sell. Is it possible that the capital market will move forever if it hits the Bitcoin mainnet? "In our usual chats, Null always strikes me as a carefree person, but this time he was actually a little sad." At the beginning, I just wanted to collect some pictures. After all, we have talked about this N times on Bitcoin. It is very cool and not expensive. With so many people coming at once, and with interests, things started to get complicated. Oh... I'm always going to be a bitch wherever I go. I just hope that people here can stick to their original aspirations of idealism."
BRC-20 is very popular, and the player base is not too large. The gathering of consensus is not new but relatively easy. Everyone has a clear goal. It doesn’t matter whether the story is good or not, but whether it can make money is important. Traffic, or influence, plays a greater role as a lever in the take-off process than ETH.
Since the names of BRC-20 tokens are limited to 4 characters, a BRC-20 token named $nals became popular with the story of "Ordi + nals gives Ordinals a complete home". $nals was actually deployed as early as March 10th, but was not fully mint until May 1st.
$ordi + $nals = ordinals
Once Mint was all done, the price of $nals took off at an alarming rate. According to transaction data on UniSat, $nals completed a 20x increase in approximately 12 hours after Mint was fully completed.
"Golden dogs" like $nals seem to be everywhere. Just look for a few of the most popular BRC-20 tokens on UniSat, and they are all flying, but the take-off posture is slightly different.
$pepe, nearly 10 times
$moon, 5x or more
$utxo, up more than 5x from lows
These tokens that took off all told the same nonsensical story as $nals. It doesn't matter, emotion is the most important. Take a look at the following moves. Do they feel familiar to ETH’s “Earth Dog Hunters”?
The "Toad" on ERC-20 and BRC-20 join forces
All BRC-20 tokens go to the $moon
Ordinals cannot do without a stroke of $utxo
Why is there a “meme season”?
Huan.sats believes that if someone makes money, someone must lose money. Overheated speculation may cause many new players to face losses. At the same time, BRC-20 is not efficient enough as a ledger system itself, and there is a risk of being replaced by better technology (for example, the author of the protocol pointed out in the official document: Would also like to mention that the taproot enabled concept of issuing assets on the bitcoin blockchain is not novel, and Taro is unequivocally a better solution), the higher the popularity, the more attention and discussion the technology itself should receive, so that BRC-20 and even the entire Ordinals ecosystem will become more and more good.
Ivan believes that "exiting the circle" is just the beginning, and what is more important is how to keep new players in the Ordinals ecosystem, rather than slowly losing "people" as the popularity of the game wanes in the future. What needs to be thought about is, will BRC-20 bring more and better project parties into the ecosystem for construction? If not yet, how to do this? After all, only high-quality projects can continue to inject incremental growth into the Ordinals ecosystem in the future.
In addition to sharing their own opinions, xiyu and Ivan also shared with me their observations on the attitudes of other Ordinals veterans and even Bitcoin veterans.
According to xiyu’s observation, the attitudes of veteran players towards Ordinals are as follows:
1. Exploring how to transfer some of the things on Ethereum to the Bitcoin chain can be considered a contribution;
2. No objection, you can mess with it as much as you like, as long as it is not in the form of a fork;
3. Keep your own Bitcoins. If you do well, Bitcoin holders will also benefit;
4. Don’t try to use pictures or data to defraud me of my Bitcoins.
As for BRC-20, xiyu said that most old players do not express their stance on BRC-20, which may also represent an attitude.
Ivan’s observation is that the attitude of veteran Ordinals players toward the BRC-20 is “polarized.” Some people believe that BRC-20, as a token protocol system, is still relatively backward in support of transactions, accounting and other aspects, but they firmly believe that there will be more complete supporting infrastructure to solve the problem in the future, and they are optimistic about the future development of BRC-20. On the contrary, some believe that BRC-20 has deviated from the center of gravity. Building BRC-20 on Bitcoin, which is extremely secure and decentralized, is putting the cart before the horse and is purely unnecessary.
Regarding the technical shortcomings of BRC-20 itself, both xiyu and Ivan emphasized the issue of "centralized dependence".
Ivan: From a technical perspective, it is difficult for BRC-20 to achieve a smooth transaction process and decentralized accounting system through inscriptions. After all, when transaction activities on the chain become increasingly frequent, the complexity of transfers will increase the amount of data to an extremely large amount and become difficult to track. Currently, it is still necessary to rely on a single centralized project party to implement the relevant accounting system, and this is a systemic risk. of. However, community opinions generally do not accept the transfer of BRC-20 protocol tokens to different chains for more convenient transactions and applications through mapping or side chaining. Instead, they only accept implementation on Bitcoin’s native network. Relevant operations to highlight its uniqueness. However, with the current technical support, in order to achieve the above more user-friendly operation process, this move means that the BRC-20 protocol will need to sacrifice the decentralization characteristics of Bitcoin and instead embrace the support of extreme reliance on centralization.
There is nothing special about BRC-20 from a capital perspective when it comes to individual tokens. However, BRC-20 as a whole has two narratives that are very attractive for growth:
1. Altcoins on the “Bitcoin Mainnet”;
2. Natural “ownerlessness”. Judging from the response from various communities, this is very appealing to new players. Since the deployers of BRC-20 tokens have no way to reserve any tokens for themselves, those who want to control the market must either spend gas to go to Mint like ordinary players, or spend money to collect chips from ordinary players. Players think that speculating on ETH’s “local dogs” is speculating, and speculating on BRC-20 is also speculating. Instead of being cut off by the "local dogs" on ETH by reserving chips for mice, instead of playing so-called "value investment" projects and watching CEX, institutions and market makers eat meat, it is better to "turn over and do it" on BRC-20 Owner".
Coinciding with the "meme season", ETH has seen the myth of getting rich like $PEPE, and the potential of BRC-20 has also made players FOMO even more. Will big CEXs such as Binance and OKX list BRC-20 tokens? It’s still so difficult to get started now, so many players will join the game in the future, right?
As for why there is a "meme season"? Every time the "meme season" appears, it is always "the right time, the right place, the right people, and the right people." For example, the $Squid "squid token" two years ago was dubbed "community autonomy" because it was on TV. It revived from the rug pull and took off again. After detonating market sentiment, there was $People, which failed to auction the constitution. This is the "timing time", and the market that is often boring and lacks hot spots will be the time for meme tokens to perform. The "location" is simple. This is the world of Crypto. There are many precedents for the increase of thousands of times. The story of "you can be free to speculate in memes" has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. As for "humanity", trends have emerged and emotions have been ignited. Is it really important to look for logic on top of this?
It's just that the "infection" of memes always brings a bit of "emotion". Just like the following cases:
"Meme season" comes and goes like the wind, year after year. It's just that every "meme season", players always tend to have a "sense of apocalyptic anxiety" - how many opportunities are there for getting rich a hundred times or a thousand times? With eager desire, BRC-20 seems to have become a "land of hope." But, who gained and who lost? Is this game on Bitcoin really a "victory for retail investors" and a "last chance"?
(The above content is excerpted and reprinted with the authorization of partner MarsBit, original text link | Source: BlockBeats)
Statement: The article only represents the author's personal views and opinions, and does not represent the objective views and positions of the blockchain. All contents and opinions are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Investors should make their own decisions and transactions, and the author and Blockchain Client will not be held responsible for any direct or indirect losses caused by investors' transactions.
This article: Is the BRC-20 token craze the “last hurray” for retail investors? First appeared in Block Guest.
