BRC-20 Was Born Out of Bitcoin Punks and .sats Domains, and It Attracted the Attention of the Bitcoin Community

In March 2023, Domo launched the BRC-20 token standard. Over the past two years, the Bitcoin ecosystem has experienced the ups and downs

March 2023 saw the launch of the BRC-20 token standard by Domo. Over the past two years, the Bitcoin ecosystem has witnessed the crypto industry's rise and fall, shifting from being ignored and questioned to being widely discussed and finally returning to obscurity. The birth of BRC-20 is undoubtedly an epoch-making event for the Bitcoin ecosystem. But who is still committed to the Bitcoin ecosystem and BRC-20 today?

As we mark the second anniversary of BRC-20, Domo, the founder who has never accepted video interviews, participates in an interview with Isabel Foxen Duke for the first time, sharing his crypto journey, the story before and after the birth of BRC-20, his views on UniSat, and the future development plans for BRC-20.

Entering the Industry from Data Analysis Work, NFT Summer Earned the First Bucket of Gold

Host: I’m glad you could come. This is your first video interview, and we want to take this opportunity for the audience to learn more about your story. I heard that before Ordinals and BRC-20, you didn’t really pay much attention to Bitcoin. Is that true? What were you doing before you got involved with the Ordinals protocol?

Domo: Two years ago, I indeed didn’t focus most of my energy on Bitcoin. Like most people, it was the Ordinals protocol that brought me back to Bitcoin. Before that, Bitcoin was just fluctuating in my account, but I wasn’t doing anything with it.

I got into cryptocurrency relatively late, starting my crypto journey in 2019, but my involvement was still shallow, mainly learning some basic crypto information through Reddit and YouTube. The real turning point happened in the summer of 2020 when I was working in data science. I discovered DeFi innovations on Ethereum, especially projects like Uniswap.

There was very clean data on-chain, and I didn’t even need to spend hours processing it to analyze it. So, the first thing I did was scrape Ethereum data for analysis and built a Telegram bot to track on-chain traders, and time proved that they were among the most profitable people during that DeFi summer.

Later, I invested my entire monthly salary into Bitcoin and Ethereum, but in reality, it almost bankrupted me, so I realized that perhaps there was only an opportunity in the crypto-native space. Around January-February 2021, I discovered some particularly useful NFT Discords, and leveraging my on-chain data skills, I captured a lot of Alpha during the NFT Summer market frenzy, so my financial performance in 2021 was outstanding, and I had a great time.

But I was still looking for a way to join the industry full-time. Until November 2021, I met someone in an NFT Discord who was working for a large crypto payment company, and then I joined their company, leading the team’s on-chain data analysis work for the next few years until I released the BRC-20 protocol.

The Birth of BRC-20: Bitcoin Punks and .sats Domains Provided Great Inspiration

Host: Do you remember when you first heard about Ordinals?

Domo: I can’t recall the exact time, but I probably saw it for the first time in January 2023. However, I didn’t do anything at that time. It wasn’t until February that I saw it again and realized it was no longer just an experimental thing being played with by a small group of people in a basement.

The early Ordinals collectibles also played an important role in the birth of BRC-20. For example, Bitcoin Punks actually invented "Fair launch" on Bitcoin first, because we had no way to distribute it through smart contracts.

Then the .sats domain was born, which truly brought Jason format data to the public and into the Bitcoin mempool. When I opened my computer at work and discovered it, I felt it was amazing; we had taken another step forward. The Ordinals protocol was no longer just an art protocol; it could also use Bitcoin as a data availability layer.

The infrastructure was right in front of us, and you could do what you wanted to do. So I started thinking about whether we could do something else? From that moment on, I saw the Ordinals protocol as a gateway to Bitcoin data availability, accessible to most users regardless of their technical ability or background.

Host: Before creating the BRC-20 protocol, did you brainstorm this protocol with others? Or did you experience some community discussions?

Domo: After seeing the .sats domain using JSON format on-chain, I saw a blogger called "redphone" (https://x.com/redphonecrypto) tweet about it. He collaborated with Delphi Ventures to release a pseudo-specification. I