BRC-20 started the year with a fork, what happened?

As 2024 enters its third day, a tweet from BRC-20 founder @domodata has stirred up a thousand waves, and the battle for the BRC-20 fork is officially on the table.

In this tweet, domo made serious accusations against UniSat. According to domo, UniSat’s move to upgrade the BRC-20-indexed Ordinals protocol to version v 0.13.0 is a “fork” of BRC-20, a “unilateral” technical act by UniSat, and a struggle for control of the protocol.

How to quickly understand this “fork” dispute? This “fork” battle is like we all hold the same asset (BRC-20 Token), and we have no problem depositing/withdrawing/trading in UniSat, Magic Eden, OKX, etc., because they all use the same accounting system. Now, UniSat wants to upgrade the accounting system, so if other places do not follow the upgrade, the rules of the accounting system may be different, and the accounting results (BRC-20 Tokens in everyone’s hands) may have different balances in different places, which may lead to confusion.

So, why is there such a divergence, and what are the attitudes of those who continue to build the BRC-20 agreement, and what are the potential implications of the divergence?

Why is there such a disagreement?

On November 9, 2023, with the output of the BitcoinBlock with a height of 816,000, the proposal to “freeze” the BRC-20 indexing specification officially came into effect.

The proposal to “freeze” the BRC-20 indexing specification was proposed by DOMO, the founder of the BRC-20 protocol, on October 26. domo named the proposal “frozen” because the BRC-20 protocol decided to maintain the stability of the index by standardizing (maintaining) the index of BRC-20 at v 0.9.0.

In October 2023, it was discovered that the inscriptions #35321413 and #35329860 can be indexed by the Ordinals protocol for version 0.9.0, but not by version 0.7.0 and version 0.8.0. Because different markets use different versions of the Ordinals protocol, some inscriptions are not indexed correctly in some markets, resulting in de facto inscription number shifts.

In the case of the BRC-20, the problem is even greater. A bug in version 0.8.0 of the Ordinals protocol can make it a huge risk to double spend beyond the Maximum Supply minting and the difference between the Ordinals protocol version in different markets. That’s why Magic Eden briefly suspended trading on the BRC-20 in November 2023 — Magic Eden wasn’t at fault, except that the version it was using happened to be overwhelmed, and it would be responsible for users to suspend trading in a timely manner.

BRC-20 is a protocol that “parasitizes” on top of the Ordinals protocol, and whether its index should be upgraded with the Ordinals protocol is a dilemma at this stage. On the one hand, the Ordinals protocol is still being updated and iterated rapidly, with more and more new features being added to the protocol, especially the “Jubilee” upgrade, which will be activated in Block Height 824544, and the original way of generating cursed inscriptions will be fixed, which means that the cursed inscription that will be given a negative number in the Ordinals protocol in v0.9.0 will be given a positive number in v0.13.0, Ordinals Differences in the versions of the protocol will make a significant difference in the numbering of subsequent new inscriptions. In addition, new features such as CBRC-20, which uses the new version of the Ordinals protocol to bring performance optimization, also pose a certain challenge to the development of BRC-20.

On the other hand, as an asset protocol that has given birth to a large number of assets with a large Market Cap, BRC-20 has naturally become the first priority in the development process. If the user’s assets are lost in order to optimize and expand the BRC-20 in pursuit of new features, it will undoubtedly cause great harm to the BRC-20 ecosystem.

On this issue, there is a disagreement among the various parties that have a say in the BRC-20 agreement, which is why BRC-20 is facing this “fork” battle. The so-called “fork” dispute is whether to upgrade the version of Ordinals running the BRC-20 index from v0.9.0.

Attitudes towards the “fork”.

Disapproval: domo, Layer 1 Foundation led by Best in Slot

Domo’s attitude was mentioned at the beginning of this article. Best in Slot tweeted yesterday that a “critical vulnerability” was found in version v0.13.1 of the Ordinals protocol that would affect the correctness of the BRC-20 balance, and strongly urged the BRC-20 index to keep the running version at version v0.9.0 to maintain the stability of the protocol. Best in Slot also tweeted that there are likely to be other bugs in the v 0.13.1 release that affect the BRC-20 protocol, and that “stability” is the first priority of BRC-20, and that the already large BRC-20 protocol cannot withstand continuous, untested upgrades.

Pro: UniSat

UniSat has always been looking to fast-track BRC-20-related developments. From the functional development of BRC-20 Swap to the upgrade of the version of the Ordinals protocol running on the BRC-20 index. Following Domo’s tweet, UniSat also tweeted in response, stating that it would suspend the rest of the development work and do its best to ensure that the BRC-20 upgrade was on schedule. At the same time, UniSat also pointed out that they will do their best to ensure that the BRC-20 does not “split”.

In addition, there is information that Magic Eden is in favor of the BRC-20 upgrade.

Neutral: TRAC

TRAC’s founder, Benny, maintains a neutral stance on disagreement. He said that it was certainly not right for the BRC-20 index to be running a version of the Ordinals protocol at v 0.9.0 all the time, but that it would take weeks or even months of testing to make sure everything worked when switching to the new version before upgrading.

Potential impact

UniSat uses the word “split” to describe the divergence, not the “fork”. UniSat pointed out that a “fork” is a physical “divergence” formed by differences in consensus, such as BCH and BTC, which actually form two chains, each developing according to its own consensus without affecting each other. The result of the BRC-20 upgrade divergence is that the BRC-20 protocol runs two indexes with different rules on the same chain (BitcoinMainnet), and still affect each other.

The “split” controversy over BRC-20 has cast another shadow over the inscription market, which is currently in a cooling period. But you don’t have to worry too much, because no one really wants to hurt the BRC-20, but there is a different understanding of how to better develop the BRC-20, which is actually a good thing, and it is also a test that the BRC-20 must endure in the development process. It is believed that all parties will properly discuss this issue, come up with a result that everyone can agree on, and develop a good dialogue mechanism from this incident. After the storm, the future of the BRC-20 is sure to be brighter.