Introduction to BRC-20 tokens

Disclaimer: Before I start I want to note that BRC-20 coins today are mostly memecoins and most don’t have utility. BRC-20 are booming during the meme season of 2023, DYOR and take them for what they really are!

First, let’s start with the “why?”

Despite the disclaimer above, I don’t think that BRC-20 tokens will be only memecoins in the future and we should recognize the big advantages of using BRC-20:

• All transactions on-chain when using Bitcoin ordinals are Bitcoin native and therefore immutable and published to the highest security chain in existence
• Bitcoin is the most high-security blockchain in the world, even more so than Ethereum.
• Strong early adoption is evidenced by the huge spike in transaction fees over the last few weeks.

LFG: how to BRC?

BRC-20 tokens have been gaining a lot of attention recently. In this tutorial, we’ll go over what exactly BRC-20 tokens are and how you can interact with them.

BRC-20 tokens were created by Domo in March 2023 and was inspired by Ethereum (ERC-20) to make fungible tokens using the ordinals protocol. BRC-20 tokens do no use smart contracts.

Domo made a little experiment test where he pretty much wrote out a deploy function of a token. This is an example of what it would look like:

Where:

• “p” would stand for the protocol, that being BRC-20
• “op” standing for operation — which is “deploy”
• “tick” being the four-letter word, the max amount of the supply
• “max” is the mint limit that you’re allowed to inscribe

How to install a wallet for BRC-20?

The best wallet that’s currently out right now is Unisat. Catchy name.

They’re the only wallet that supports BRC-20 tokens as of right now. They are 100% open source. You can also use the wallet to create your first Taproot address.

To set up a Unisat wallet, go to the Unisat.io site and download it for Chrome or Brave. You can also download it from their GitHub and set it up yourself, but in my case, I’m not really trying to complicate things. So what you would do is just create a new wallet, create a password for it, and then you’d be given your 12-word recovery phrase. After you write it down, you can go ahead and create an HD wallet.

An HD wallet pretty stands for “Hierarchical Deterministic”, which means that it lets you create many wallets with different types of addresses which is amazing. The best wallet for ordinals is Taproot:

Once you have your wallet set up, you’ll be able to view your balance and your address for both your inscriptions and your Bitcoin balance. You’ll also have the option to receive and send tokens.

When you inscribe a token, you’re not actually able to automatically put it up on a marketplace or even transfer it to another account if you wanted to. You actually have to create a “transfer” inscription:

• The operation (“op”), which is “transfer” instead of “mint” or “deploy” like you would normally see
• The tick name (which is already set), and the amount that you actually want to have transferable.

Once you’ve created this, you’d go back to the BRC-20 section and then you now would see that you have the ability to transfer out your BRC-20 tokens. Of course, your available balance is whatever isn’t transferable and then your total balance is how many of that token you have in total.

How to mint BRC-20 tokens?

Go to the https://unisat.io/brc20 page and look up the token you want to mint.

Click on the “Mint directly” button on the token’s page. The tick name and max amount that you’re allowed to inscribe should already be filled out for you. At the bottom of the page, you have the “Repeat Mint” option to do multiple inscriptions or multiple mints.

Submit and pay the invoice. You can pay with a Unisat wallet, other coins, or just straight up pay with Bitcoin by scanning the code or sending Bitcoin to the provided address.

How to transfer and list BRC-20 tokens

First, not that on the Unisat marketplaces, everything is listed in SATs.

Here are the steps to transfer and list BRC-20 tokens:

1. Once your BRC-20 token has minted, go to the BRC-20 tab and see your available balance.
2. Click on the token you want to make transferable and hit “transfer.”
3. Choose how many tokens you want to make transferable and set your custom fee rate.
4. Review the preview of your transfer inscription and hit “pay” once everything looks good.
5. Wait for your transfer inscription to get confirmed.
6. Once confirmed, go to the orders section and see what prices other tokens have been selling for.
7. Choose a price for your token listing and hit “list.”
8. Sign the transaction.

Deploying Your Own BRC-20 Token

If you want to deploy your own BRC-20 token, go to the “Inscribe” section on Unisat and click on “Deploy”. You will be asked to enter the token name and total supply. For example, you could enter “KIMI” as the token name and “21000000" as the total supply. You can also set a limit per amount; for fun, let’s set it to 10,000.

After entering this information, click “Next” and you will see the text that you need to inscribe. Click “Next” again and you will see the inscribing settings that you need to change. Once you have made the necessary changes, click “Submit and Pay”. You will then need to sign and send the transaction using your Unisat wallet.

Remember that you can only use four letters for the token name and it is not case-sensitive

Congratulations! You have now created a new BRC-20 token.

Making Batch Inscriptions for Transfers

To make batch inscriptions for transfers, copy the text provided in the description below (which lists all the different types of operations you can do).

Go to the ‘Inscribe’ page. Click on ‘Text’ and then select ‘Bulk’.

Put inside the text box the inscribe in bulk — one inscription for every new line:

{ "p": "brc-20", "op": "transfer", "tick": "NOOT", "amt": "50000" }

Once you have entered all your transfers, click ‘Next’ and review your entries to make sure everything is correct. Then sign and send the transaction using your Unisat wallet.

You have now successfully created a batch transfer inscription!

I hope this guide was helpful!

Follow me on Twitter: @financeguru_eth.

Big shout out to @pazngmi for creating a great BRC-20 video tutorial. Some of the screenshots in this article are from his video.

Also, big shout out to @domodata, Udi Wertheimer, @LeonidasNFT that make the BRC-20 and Ordinals space awesome.