BRC-20: A New “Token Standard” on Bitcoin

There has been a resurgence in Bitcoin activities in 2023 amidst a prolonged bear market as enthusiasts popularized Ordinals, a new convention for creating non-fungible assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. The hype surrounding it has driven the daily Bitcoin transactions to record numbers, with its seven-day moving average exceeding the 500k mark for the first time in history.

The technical aspect of how Ordinals function without the need for network upgrades was covered in a previous Rapid Insights piece. To recap, under the Ordinals system, every single satoshi (sat) is viewed as unique and non-fungible, and sat owners can “inscribe” data onto sats to make them distinct and give them special meanings. Sats with data inscribed are called inscriptions.