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The BRC-20 Bitcoin token standard has become the latest trend in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, especially after the rise of the Pepe meme coin in recent months. A total of 8,500 different tokens have been minted using the BRC-20 standard, and most of these BRC-20 tokens are meme coins like Pepe and Meme.
BRC-20 is an experimental token standard on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, modeled after Ethereum’s ERC-20. This allows programmers to create and send fungible tokens through the Ordinals protocol.
Although the BRC-20 token standard is modeled after the ERC-20, it is fundamentally different from its Ethereum-based counterpart. BRC-20 tokens do not use smart contracts. The token standard also requires a bitcoin wallet to mint and trade these tokens.
The BRC-20 token standard was created in early March of this year by an anonymous network analyst named Domo. The goal was to enable the issuance and transfer of fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. The market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens has risen sharply over the past month and is currently at $120 million, up 600% from last week.
The BRC-20 token frenzy has also eclipsed the original number of bitcoin transactions on the blockchain. The number of BRC-20 transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain reached over 50% between April 29 and May 2, exceeding normal BTC transactions.
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The maximum volume of BRC-20 tokens occurred on May 1 with 366,000 transactions, and the total number of transactions on the network is 2.36 million.
Along with the increase in the number of BRC-20 transactions, transaction fees have also increased significantly due to the activity of new tokens. Since its inception at the end of April, the network has generated an additional 109.7 BTC in transaction fees for miners.
The meme-coin frenzy has been a prominent topic on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, but with the advent of the BRC-20 standard, a similar trend is being seen on the Bitcoin blockchain. The meme-coin frenzy also led to a significant increase in gas fees on the Ethereum network, which also led to network congestion.