Glossary
BRC-20
A token standard for Bitcoin that uses Ordinals inscriptions as a JSON-based ledger — fungible tokens deployed entirely via inscribed transactions.
BRC-20, introduced in March 2023 by an anonymous developer
"domo", encodes fungible token operations (deploy, mint,
transfer) as JSON inscriptions on individual satoshis. The
Bitcoin protocol itself doesn't know about BRC-20; off-chain indexers
read the inscriptions and maintain the canonical balance set.
The model is a pragmatic hack — slow, expensive, and dependent on indexer consensus — but it kicked off a wave of Bitcoin-native token experiments and drove sustained inscription activity well into 2024.