I don't even know what these are. So is this some non-standard way to create tokens on Bitcoin? So like people are creating tokens (just useless meme tokens I assume) on Bitcoin with some non-standard ordinal-specific wallet or something? How are they trading them? As far as I know there aren't any decentralized exchanges like on Ethereum where you can trade anything, since tokens haven't really existed on Bitcoin before except a few old examples. Or is there some non-standard brc-20 wallet that lets you swap them? Or are there some exchanges that are actually listing these random tokens? Where do you even see what the brc-20 tokens are? Are there any popular ones? Are there a lot of them?
Let's see if I can mash all the answers to this tsunami of ? without sending you to read a link
People found a way to mint tokens (brc20) which
theoretically are fungible tokens on the bitcoin protocol, replicating some features of erc20 tokens but with a ton of serious flaws, in short, they are using basically the same let's call it ordinal exploit to mint them.
As for trading them, I have no idea if there is a marketplace for them other than
https://brc-20.io/ which looks like some 90s cms shop to me. Same for the wallet, I know there are 3 wallets that allow you to mint ordinals, like Xverse but no idea if they support brc-20 tokens, instead, you have a ton of web services where you can mint them quite cheaply if we take into account the fees we pay right now for a normal tx.
The bad news:
https://twitter.com/TheBinanceNFT/status/1655885586853425152?cxt=HHwWgMCzkeDK8fotAAAABinance is planning on adding ordinals, so from here just a step to adopt brc20 as the smell of cash and fat fees is probably too much for CZ.
For the numbers, OMG, just go to
https://brc-20.io/ there are nearly 15k of them, no idea about "popularity" but there must be some with an overall trade volume for 200 million a day!
Also I see there has been an spam attack on Bitcoin this past week, and especially I guess on Sunday and Monday. Does this have to do with brc-20? Seems like that's what people are saying. Are people like just minting tons of these random tokens and that is what is flooding the mempool? Or is the spam attack entirely separate?
Yes to all of them! And is it really a spam attack, users are simply using what's available to them, if some want to pay $1000 to mint a frog meme with their own coins, it's their right, right?
And at what price?
That's why I've asked!