Interlay Labs has released the BRC-21 standard for minting and redeeming decentralized cross-chain BRC-20 tokens.

On May 8th, Interlay Labs released version 0.1 of the BRC-21 token standard, which outlines a standard for minting and redeeming BRC-20 tokens on and off the Bitcoin network. These tokens were initially created on other "source" chains such as Ethereum (ETH, DAI, etc.), Cosmos, Polkadot, or Interlay. Regarding the use cases for this standard, Interlay Labs stated: "While BRC-21 assets can represent ETH, DOT, SOL, and other assets on Bitcoin, we believe the primary use case emerging from this standard is the deployment of decentralized stablecoins to payment protocols like Lightning Network or similar. Decentralized stablecoins like MakerDAO, Liquity, or RAI require complex minting, redemption, and liquidation mechanisms to maintain their pegs. Due to a lack of programmability, these protocols cannot be directly deployed on Bitcoin and are unlikely to be able to do so in the near future. We believe that a fully decentralized method of mining and redeeming cross-chain assets from Bitcoin is more likely to be adopted on a large scale than spending time engineering Bitcoin protocols that can be represented in a few lines of code elsewhere."