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- The market cap of BRC-20 tokens has surged to nearly $1 billion as the demand for Bitcoin-based tokens increases.
- ORDI, the first such token, was listed on major exchanges, leading to a surge in the market cap of tokens built on the Bitcoin blockchain.
BRC-20 Tokens Approach $1 Billion Market Cap
The market cap of BRC-20 tokens has reached almost $1 billion as the demand for Bitcoin-based tokens continues to increase. The market value of ORDI, MEME, and other tokens has surged in recent days as traders drive up their value. The market cap of all BRC-20 tokens combined totals around $991 million, according to brc-20.io, which tracks the nascent market for tokens minted on the Bitcoin blockchain.
What are BRC-20 Tokens?
Short for “Bitcoin Request for Comment,” BRC-20 is an experimental framework for building fungible tokens on Bitcoin using Ordinals, the protocol that enables people to mint NFT-like assets on Bitcoin called inscriptions. BRC-20 tokens have existed for two months and were pioneered by the pseudonymous on-chain data enthusiast Domo, who took inspiration from the ERC-20 token standard on Ethereum and launched a token called ORDI on March 8.
ORDI and Other BRC-20 Tokens Gain Mainstream Adoption
ORDI, the very first BRC-20 token, was listed on major exchanges such as Crypto.com and Gate.io, indicating that the experimental token is gaining mainstream adoption on cryptocurrency exchanges. The market cap of ORDI has reached around $400 million, according to brc-20.io. Other BRC-20 tokens like PEPE, MEME, PIZA, and DOMO have followed suit as Bitcoin goes through the kind of meme coin mania that has gripped the wider crypto market in the past with Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and BONK.
Impact on Bitcoin Transactions
The popularity of BRC-20 tokens is having a noticeable impact on Bitcoin transactions overall. On Sunday, 65% of Bitcoin transactions were related to BRC-20 tokens, according to another Dune dashboard, and leading crypto exchange Binance briefly halted Bitcoin withdrawals due to network congestion. The volatility of BRC-20 tokens highlights the emergent nature of the Ordinals space, as text-based inscriptions—used to create and trade the tokens—take over and image-based inscriptions become less common.
Yesterday, over 399,000 inscriptions were text-based compared to 20 that were image-based, according to data from Dune.
Concerns About Bitcoin Ordinals Community
There is fresh controversy brewing in the Bitcoin Ordinals community after a developer under the moniker “Supertestnet” initiated a transaction that had no input or output but is nevertheless seen as valid. This resulted in the Ordinals’s inscription numbering system crashing, sparking concerns that the whole protocol may now be broken. Ordinal inscriptions, also known as “proof of ownership” inscriptions, are essentially a way of attaching metadata to a specific Bitcoin transaction.
This metadata can be used to track and verify the ownership of assets, including BRC-20 tokens.