Recently, we witnessed another controversy when Domo made serious accusations against Unisat about their upgrade that would lead to BRC 20 being forked. So let’s find out the details of this story with Weakhand in this article.
Before jumping into the article, everyone can refer to some of the following articles to understand better.
- What is BRC 20? All you need to know about BRC 20
- Summary of potential BRC 20 projects
- Top 5 potential BRC 20 platforms
- BRC 20 brings innovation and disruption to the Bitcoin network
A Brief Summary of the BRC 20 Protocol
BRC 20 is a protocol built on top of Bitcoin Ordinals, allowing token creation on the Bitcoin blockchain. This is done through using Bitcoin as the available data layer and using offline indexing tools to determine the meta-protocol state.
To date, BRC 20 is the most successful token issuance protocol on the Bitcoin network. The place that gave birth to ORDI or SATS with market capitalization and trading volume up to billions of dollars. While it is not perfect (it has limited functionality, adding burden to the UTXO set), the BRC 20 protocol is extremely easy to deploy and mint tokens, and has inspired a wave of Inscriptions across most major Blockchain on the market.
Complexity of building BRC Protocol 20
Because it is built on the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol and because Bitcoin Ordinals is a completely new protocol, it has regular changes and updates. This will make BRC 20 always dependent on Bitcoin Ordinals, meaning that when Bitcoin Ordinals upgrades, BRC 20 must also upgrade. This is what happened with Ordinals 0.8.0 and Ordinals 0.9.0 causing the indexer to report incorrect balances when BRC 20 tokens were mixed in these two versions.
To solve this problem, Layer 1 Foundation – an organization that provides a development environment for the BRC 20 standard on the Bitcoin blockchain has announced to maintain the Bitcoin Ordinals version at 0.9.0 to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. Therefore, tokens issued based on the BRC 20 protocol will use the Bitcoin Ordinals 0.9.0 indexing toolkit.
Domo’s Allegations Against Unisat
Recognizing the serious implications and valuations involved, I believe rushing these updates in BRC20 is reckless, disregards their peer indexers, and could potentially harm the wider community of BRC20 users. The 0.8/0.9 incident highlights the complexities of integrating… https://t.co/RccP7bYdVY
— domo (@domodata) January 2, 2024
Why did this make Domo react so violently? Simply because in the past we had no problems depositing, withdrawing or trading BRC 20 tokens on many exchanges such as OKX, Unisat,… because they all use the same set of indexing tools. item. Currently, Unisat wants to upgrade to version v 0.13.0 and if other exchanges do not proceed with the upgrade, different calculation results and balances will appear, which may lead to mistake.
This issue has occurred in the past when in October 2023, it was discovered that Inscriptions #35321413 and #35329860 could be indexed by v 0.9.0 of the Ordinals protocol but not by v 0.7 .0 and v 0.8.0. Because different markets use different versions of the Ordinals protocol, some Inscriptions cannot be indexed correctly in some markets, causing de facto data variation.
To solve this problem, on October 26, 2023, Domo issued a “freeze” proposal to decide to standardize BRC 20 in version 0.9.0 to maintain protocol stability.
Domo’s proposal to standardize BRC 20
Opinions of the Parties Regarding This Case
BestinSlot – an Ordinals Aggregator on the Bitcoin network
Important Notice for BRC-20 Ecosystem
We have discovered a critical bug affecting #brc20 balances in the latest released version of ord, 0.13.1.
We strongly recommend all BRC-20 indexers adhere to using version 0.9 of ord until this issue is resolved.
It is also highly…
— BestinSlot.xyz (@bestinslotxyz) January 2, 2024
BestinSlot also gave its opinion in this case that a serious vulnerability has been found in the Ordinals v 0.13.1 protocol that will affect the accuracy of BRC-20 balances and strongly calls for BRC -20 keeps the version running at v 0.9.0 to maintain protocol stability.
Response from Unisat insiders
We’re sorry that we have to defer the development of our other tasks at hand to make sure the Ordinals Jubilee upgrade of brc-20 works as expected.
It’s a tight schedule for us. But we will do everything we can to prevent brc-20 from splitting up with Ordinals.
— UniSat Wallet – Store, Subscribe and Search. (@unisat_wallet) January 2, 2024
UniSat has always aimed to rapidly accelerate developments related to BRC 20. From developing AMM Dex for BRC 20 to announcing that it will support the promotion of Ordinals protocol version upgrades. Following domo’s tweet, UniSat also tweeted in response saying that it will now pause other development tasks and do its best to ensure that the BRC 20 upgrade proceeds as planned. At the same time, UniSat also indicated that it will do its best to ensure that BRC-20 does not “separate”.
The founder of TRAC offered a neutral view
Thank you for spotting this. This should hold true for any inscription, not just brc20. However, we need an upgrade path, with weeks/months testing ahead before switching to newer versions. However, sticking to 0.9 forever isn’t the right solution either imho.
— BennyTheDev (@rarity_garden) January 2, 2024
TRAC founder Benny maintains a neutral stance in the face of disagreements. He said it was definitely a mistake to have the Ordinals protocol version running on the BRC-20 index at v 0.9.0 but that weekly or even monthly testing was needed before upgrading to ensure that it worked. Switching to the new version will work normally.
summary
This controversy has caused the Bitcoin Ordinals community to become excited and worried. I believe that the parties will properly discuss this issue, come up with an outcome that everyone agrees with, and build a good dialogue mechanism from this incident. Above is all the information that I want to introduce in this article, hope everyone has received useful knowledge.
