Market cap of ‘Bitcoin Request for Comment’ (BRC-20) token rockets to $137M, up 600% in one week

Interest in “Bitcoin Request for Comment” or BRC-20 tokens built with Ordinals and stored on the Bitcoin base chain has skyrocketed, lifting their market value by several hundred percent.

At the time of writing, the combined market cap of more than 8,800 BRC-20 tokens was $137 million – a staggering 682% increase from $17.5 million a week ago, according to data tracked by Ordinals builder Ordspace. (For a brief moment early Tuesday, the site showed the total market capitalization at $2.93 billion. Ordspace said that figure was not accurate and likely the result of low liquidity in some of the tokens.)

A pseudonymous analyst at the chain is called Dome created the BRC-20 token standard in early March to facilitate the issuance and transfer of fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. The experimental invention came weeks after Ordinals Protocol was published, and allows users to enter digital art references into small transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

“Ordinals on Bitcoin have had unintended consequences. Among these is the invention of the BRC-20 fungible token standard. It is now possible to create fungible tokens on BT,” said pseudonymous analyst and yield farmer Dynamo DeFi in the latest edition of the weekly newsletter. “Since inception, BRC-20s have accounted for nearly 6% of all Bitcoin activity.”

The BRC-20 standard sounds similar to the popular ERC-20 standard, but the two are different, and the former lacks the ability to interact with smart contracts. ERC-20 is the technical standard for fungible tokens created using Ethereum, the premier smart contract blockchain.

“This[BRC-20] is not a token standard that you are used to with EVM chains, which create smart contracts that manage the token standard and its various rules. Instead, it is simply a way to store a script file in bitcoin and use it to attribute tokens to satoshis and then allow them to be transferred between users,” crypto exchange Binance said in an explanation.

Most active BRC-20 tokens fall into meme coins – cryptocurrencies that originate from an internet meme or humorous characteristic. At press time, the top three coins were struck with the BRC-20 standard ORDI, OG and PEPE.

According to Boolean Fund’s Mark Jeffrey, the launch of BRC-20 tokens has eliminated the need for crypto exchanges.

“With the BRC-20s, the Bitcoin blockchain is the exchange. There’s no Binance, no Coinbase needed. Just a Bitcoin wallet. You create, buy and sell at rate. Bitcoin is now gas,” Jeffrey tweeted over the weekend, noting the increase in the market cap of BRC-20 tokens.