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What exactly is BRC20? Does it allow anyone to create their own "metaverse inscription"?

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BRC20 is developed based on the Ordinals protocol.

Original author: Leek Brothers (Twitter: @cryptoleek)

Editor's note: Defi researcher Leek Brothers published the "Bitcoin Popularization" series on X, the previous article discussed "In-depth analysis of inscriptions, horizontal comparison of Bitcoin and Ethereum accounting models". In this article today, he will introduce in detail what BRC20 is and its origin. The full text is organized by BlockBeats as follows:

1. BRC20 was developed based on the Ordinals protocol. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Ordinals, there would be no BRC20. BRC20 was invented by an anonymous genius @domodata, who wrote a protocol that was then improved by various communities and the Bitcoin team. @unisat_wallet and @okxweb3 played a crucial role in promoting the entire BRC20 protocol.

2. So what is BRC20? In fact, it consists of two parts: one is the inscription engraving; the other is the offline index indexer. Let's take a look at each one separately.

3. Inscription Engraving

As mentioned earlier, inscriptions can be used to create any form of document, including JSON files. The BRC20 protocol specifies three types of inscriptions that can be engraved.

The first one is called deploy inscription, which specifies the symbol of the token, the maximum supply, and the minting limit.

·The second one is called mint inscription, which specifies how many tokens you can mint.

·The last one is called the transfer inscription, which specifies the circulation situation and quantity between BRC20. For more details, please refer to the document: https://layer1.gitbook.io/layer1-foundation/protocols/brc-20/documentation

4. The second part is the offline INDEXER.

The role of Indexer is to search for all BRC20 minting on the Bitcoin chain. Based on the deployment, minting, and transfer situations, it indexes the amount of coins held by each person. Of course, there are many indexing rules, and I will list a few examples. For more information, please refer to the document: https://layer1.gitbook.io/layer1-foundation/protocols/brc-20/indexing.

5. The currently famous open-source indexers are as follows:

6. Currently, there are people in the community promoting BRC20 as an interesting experiment that recursively defines more complex asset formats. For example, game items, animations and effects, or game modules in the metaverse. These formats will be completely open source, allowing anyone to create their own "metaverse inscriptions".

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