Bitcoin's BRC-20 token standard has become the latest trend in the crypto ecosystem, especially after the rise of the Pepe (PEPE) meme coin in recent months. A total of 8,500 different tokens were minted using the BRC-20 standard, with the majority of BRC-20 tokens being memecoins such as PEPE and Memetic (MEME).
BRC-20 is an experimental token standard on Bitcoin, a blockchain modeled after Ethereum's ERC-20. It allows programmers to create and send fungible tokens through the Ordinals protocol.
Although the BRC-20 token standard is modeled after ERC-20, it is fundamentally different from Ethereum-based token standards. BRC-20 tokens do not use smart contracts. Token Standard also requires a Bitcoin wallet to mint and trade these tokens. The BRC-20 token standard was created in early March by an anonymous on-chain analyst named Domo. The goal is to enable the issuance and transfer of fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. The market capitalization of the BRC-20 token has exploded over the past month and currently stands at $120 million, up 600% in the past week.
The frenzy for BRC-20 tokens also dwarfs the number of initial Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain. The number of BRC-20 transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain reached more than 50% between April 29 and May 2, outperforming regular BTC transactions. BRC-20 Token transaction volume peaked at 366,000 transactions on May 1, out of a total of 2.36 million transactions on the network.
As BRC-20 transaction volumes increased, transaction fees spiked due to new token activity. Since its inception in late April, the network has generated an additional 109.7 BTC in transaction fees for miners. The memecoin mania has been a noteworthy topic on the Ethereum blockchain , but a similar trend has been observed on the Bitcoin blockchain with the rise of the BRC-20 standard. The memecoin craze also led to a sharp increase in gas fees on the Ethereum network, leading to network congestion.
