BRC-20 Strategy: a 10x Guide to Bitcoin Ordinals

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Coinmonks

6 min readDec 17, 2023

Back in May ’23, Ordinals took the market by storm, clogging the entire BTC network and skyrocketing gas fees with the introduction of BRC-20. And even though some BTC developers hate Ordinals with all their heart and would love to “patch this bug”, the fact of the matter is: Ordinals bring in massive fees for BTC miners. So why would they vote against that?

And those thinking Ordinals would be a passing fad, have been proven wrong with the latest pump, sending the Ordinals king $ORDI to new ATHs. So: how can you get your piece of this growing pie?

Get started

First thing you need is a wallet. Sadly you can’t use your MetaMask wallet and you’ll need to install another one. The Unisat Wallet browser extension is my weapon of choice.

When it comes to funds, some marketplaces recommend using the Taproot address, but I have been mainly using Native Segwit (both work on the Unisat marketplace). Of course the Unisat Wallet supports all of them. Just ignore Legacy and Nested Segwit.

Different supported Bitcoin address types

And don’t worry, you can move funds around from your Native Segwit wallet to your Taproot and visa versa.

When it comes to marketplaces there is also a sea of choice, but the dominant ones are Ordinals Wallet, Unisat.io and MagicEden (yes the NFT marketplace).

In this guide we’ll focus on Unisat.io .

Hunting … gems?

The whole BRC-20 space is still new and not as easy to navigate as the other chains. By now everyone knows how to use MetaMask, browse CoinGecko and CoinMarketcap or simply to keep an eye out for new Binance listings. None of that with Ordinals. Only a handful of BRC-20 tokens are listed and most aren’t even on CoinGecko.

Navigating these waters requires you to follow important Twitter accounts, keeping an eye on marketplaces and using different screeners.

Twitter accounts

Here are some Twitter accounts to get your started:

Screeners

Some screeners that you can use with info on BRC-20 tokens before they hit CoinGecko or CMC:

Minting from contract

The strategy that I feel is currently still lucrative, if you have the gas money, is simply scanning all BRC-20 tokens deploying and minting on Unisat: https://unisat.io/brc20

How to get started:

Install your Unisat Wallet: https://unisat.io/download
Add some BTC (you’ll need a few hundred $$ to pay for gas)
Connect your UniSat Wallet to the UniSat marketplace:
Click on “BRC-20”: https://unisat.io/brc20
Sign the message to login (double check you are signing a message and not a transaction + double check the URL)
Click on “In-progress”

Now it’s time to use common sense, you want potential tokens with a good mix of holders. Seeing 5 or 10 holders and a 90% mint complete makes 0 sense.

What are we looking for:

5K+ holders (depending on max supply)
70% (or more) completed mints
Calculate if your gas fee makes sense

I suggest skipping straight to page 4 to find anything interesting.

In this example TTIN is one to keep an eye on.

Does gas make sense?

Once you select a BRC-20 that is interested, you can click on the name to get more details and/or mint directly from the contract.

In this case we see that TTIN has a max supply of 10 Billion tokens and you can mint max. 100K per transaction.

Let’s take a look what the cost would be to mint 100K at the time of writing:

Calculating minting costs before you mint

We can see that the total cost of minting 100K TTIN ~26$ .

That means that if we mint, inscribe for transfer (= making your BRC-20 ready for sale; compare it to setting your spending limit on Ethereum) and actually listing it, you’ll be down 50$ .

Long story short: if you want to break-even 100K TTIN = 50$

If we use that information to calculate a rough “break-even marketcap”: 10.000.000.000 / 100.000 * 50$ = 5M

Personally, that’s a pretty big marketcap for a random project to ape in. But if you can mint on a moment where the network isn’t that busy your initial investment will go down and you chances of profit go up.

A rising tide raises all ships

Now, why on earth would you want to ape into projects like that? It of course makes sense to try and do more research and scan Crypto Twitter for more information on these potential coins, but most of the time you wont find any. However, some people are spending money on minting this out, so it means they want it to go places.

Once the hype around Ordinals picks up, you see people aping into basically anything. So if you can limit your risk to the minting cost, you are in a pretty good position and you can offload your bags onto others aping in.

Does it really work?

Yes, when there is mania it works. During the first Ordinals wave earlier this year, I minted random BRC-20’s like $BANK, $MAXI and more.

$BANK I flipped nicely for 700$ profit in 2 days after it minted out, $BANK I held all the way down and is slightly above break-even at a 100$ value. $MAXI I’m currently also 200$.

This month however I minted: $MICE, $UCAT, .com and $XEN+.

The results are:

$MICE: minted 30K at ~180$; sold for 3000$ (+2800$)
$UCAT: minted 10M at ~180$; current value 100$ (-80$)
$XEN+: minted 150M at ~90$; current value 30$ (-70$)
$.com: minted 50 at 30$; current value 160$ (+130$)

So far so good.

What else?

Gas fees are currently super high, so sometimes it can be worth waiting for a BRC-20 to mint out and then buy off market cheaper as the current mint price (because of high gas). A good example of this is $doge (which hasn’t minted out, but is trading because buying market is cheaper as minting because of the very low “max limit per mint”):

$doge listing price is lower as the minting price

minting $doge right now doesn’t make sense

That’s it for this guide. If you found this helpful and you have any success stories or tips to share, please post a comment and give this post a clap.

See you in the next one

Bren