Overview
What are BRC-20 tokens?
BRC-20 tokens are fungible digital assets created on the Bitcoin blockchain. BRC-20 is a protocol that lets users deploy, mint, and trade secondary tokens on Bitcoin Ordinals, without the use of smart contracts. Essentially, the BRC-20 "protocol" is a set of rules that the community has agreed to follow that enable trading similar to an ERC-20.
Types of BRC-20 Inscriptions
The BRC-20 protocol consists of 3 types of inscriptions: DEPLOY, MINT and TRANSFER. All of these are JSON inscribed as text.
DEPLOY
Deploy Inscriptions essentially "create" the token, and define the rules of the mint. All token tickers must be 4 characters (we'll use TOKN as an example) and have a Total Supply, as well as a Max Amount Per Mint. The creator can choose any value for both of these, but I'll outline the most common values. - Example Total Supply: 21,000,000 TOKN Example Mint Limit: 1,000 TOKN This means that once the - Deploy transaction is confirmed, users can start minting TOKN by creating MINT inscriptions for TOKN of amount 1,000. Assuming everyone mints the max amount (no reason not to) then after 21,000 MINT inscriptions confirm, TOKN is sold out. If anyone else tries to mint TOKN after this, then their inscription is worthless. Also, it doesn't matter who STARTS the inscription process first, it only matters which confirms first. So for a hype BRC-20 mint, it's advantageous to use higher fees than recommended!! as a rule of thumb, I always put 25% higher than the fastest recommended fee.
MINT INSCRIPTIONS.
The main platform used for minting is https://unisat.io/. Here's an example mint page https://unisat.io/brc20/TOKN. Once you connect your wallet, you can click "Mint Directly" and you will see a pop-up asking how many times you would like to mint. Unisat will automatically create the JSON for you, including the correct Max Mint Limit, all you have to do is choose the "Repeat Mint" number and sign the TX. After confirming, your inscriptions will start minting! As soon as they confirm, you would now be the owner of some TOKN, as long as it did not sell out while you were minting! Note: As a general rule, if I'm going to mint something, I like to do at least 5, because of the inherent fees involved in selling on secondary, it's not worth it to just mint 1 or 2.
CHECK BALANCE
To check your BRC-20 balances, you can use Unisat's wallet checker. Here's an example wallet: https://unisat.io/brc20?t=1708022260028&q=bc1qthcwum6rk9q5hfmnwp5f05vtg3vr2vhe7t4luh
TRANSFER INSCRIPTIONS - SELLING ON SECONDARY
To buy / sell inscriptions, head to https://unisat.io/market/brc20. In the drop-down in the top left, you can choose which asset's market to view. And to view all your current balances, click "My BRC-20" on the top right, with your wallet connected. To sell a BRC, you DON'T ACTUALLY SELL THE MINT INSCRIPTION. That would force all sales to be done in increments of the mint limit, which is inflexible. Instead, you create a TRANSFER INSCRIPTION with the amount that you intend to sell, and you sell that. The blockchain will then subtract this amount from your BRC balance of that token. Here's an example:
You mint 5 inscriptions of TOKN, totalling 5,000 TOKN.
You decide to sell 2500, so you create a Transfer inscription of 2500 TOKN.
You sell this 2500 on secondary
Even though you still have 5,000 worth of MINT inscriptions, the blockchain KNOWS that your current balance is 2500, which is reflected in the balance checker above.
To actually create the TRANSFER inscriptions, all you need to do is click the "LIST" button on the right of the "My BRC-20" dropdown, and indicate how much you would like to list. This triggers a Transfer inscription, and once that is complete, you will be able to list it on secondary for whatever amount you choose.
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