BRC-20

BRC-20 is a token standard that lets people create and trade fungible tokens directly on the Bitcoin blockchain by writing small pieces of JSON data onto individual satoshis rather than deploying a smart contract.

The standard was created by an anonymous developer known as Domo in March 2023, building on the Ordinals protocol that lets users inscribe arbitrary data onto individual satoshis. A BRC-20 token is defined through three simple inscription types: "deploy" sets a token's name and maximum supply, "mint" issues new units up to that cap, and "transfer" moves a fixed amount to a new owner. Because Bitcoin has no built-in virtual machine, none of this logic runs on-chain; independent indexers scan the blockchain and interpret the inscriptions to calculate balances, which means different indexers can occasionally disagree about who owns what.

ORDI, the first BRC-20 token, sparked a wave of copycat deployments in 2023 that pushed Bitcoin transaction fees sharply higher and left the network cluttered with so called "junk" UTXOs. Compared with Ethereum's token standard, ERC-20, BRC-20 tokens are far less programmable: inscriptions are immutable once written and cannot support features like automated swaps or staking.

By 2026, BRC-20 activity has cooled well below its 2023 peak, with trading concentrated in a handful of tokens such as ORDI and SATS, while newer formats like Runes have drawn much of the fresh interest in Bitcoin native tokens.