Blockchain
On the latest episode of Unchained hosted by renowned crypto journalist Laura Shin, Bitcoin educator Dan Held and Bitcoin Frontier Fund Managing Partner Trevor Owens discussed the rise of BRC-20 tokens. The guests explored the concept of the ordinal theory of Bitcoin and its relationship with these tokens.
Shin started the discussion by delving into Bitcoin’s ordinal theory. Held described ordinals as the “order of satoshis”, which assigns value to satoshis in a specific order based on a shared social consensus. With the emergence of BRC-20 tokens, the term “ordinal” has become an umbrella concept encompassing various aspects of Bitcoin.
Traditionally, the Bitcoin blockchain only supported BTC. However, BRC-20 tokens have been getting a lot of attention within the crypto community lately. Owens acknowledged the organic growth of BRC-20 from an anonymous Twitter user named Domo. He emphasized:
This new design space created by ordinals is the concept of adding smart contracts to Bitcoin via node software, as opposed to on-chain logic like an EVM.
Held highlighted the remarkable growth of BRC-20s and highlighted the tokens’ increasing appeal among users. Despite their relatively short existence, BRC-20 tokens have quickly gained popularity and combined to exceed $1 billion in market cap within weeks.
However, Owens acknowledged that the functionality of BRC-20 tokens is currently limited:
There is no other functionality yet. People are starting to use it where they can boost, but we’re in a bear market right now. There is not much innovation in new types of tokens and I think the market is still a bit immature.
Nevertheless, Owens emphasized the superiority of BRC-20 as a meme coin protocol compared to Ethereum. According to him, the reason for this is that there is no crowdfunding, and that it is a fair launch. He concluded by saying that BRC-20 “created simplicity by having less functionality”.