With people focusing on $PEPE, another meme coin trend has seemingly snuck under the radar, BRC-20s. As readers remember, BRC-20s are a novel token standard that uses Ordinal Theory to mint and transfer tokens directly on Bitcoin L1. There are now more than 12K BRC-20s, all on Bitcoin, with a growing ecosystem of infrastructure and tooling.
BRC-20s have been overshadowed by their ERC-20 meme coin cousins – especially $PEPE. But BRC-20s are throwing up impressive numbers. The total market cap of BRC-20s has grown from $0 to around $215M in a few weeks. $ORDI, the first BRC-20, has grown to a market cap of $150M, with the token shooting up 231% in 7 days. Meanwhile, the new Ordinal and BRC-20 marketplace Unisat.io has come to dominate the marketplace wars with $3.5M of daily volume.
Market caps for BRC-20s are, at best, estimates as the market is highly illiquid, and marketplaces function more like Opensea than Uniswap. But regardless, meme coin speculators shouldn’t ignore this trend.
The growth of BRC-20s is a boon to Bitcoin – it brings tx fees and users to Bitcoin who would otherwise go elsewhere. Additionally, new projects and teams are building apps directly on Bitcoin to leverage this new tech. For the first time in a while, Bitcoin has exciting new apps with actual users.
Jebus.eth, reflecting on the recent memecoin price action, thinks ETH is a bet on people being irresponsible with their money, i.e., speculating on memecoins. But with the advent of BRC-20s, this may no longer be true. Bitcoin and Ethereum could both now be a bet on people gambling on memecoins!