🥷 Bitcoin's Dirty Little Secret: BRC-20

GM Legends,

Crypto isn’t looking great right now. Alts are tanking, memes have crashed and Bitcoin is clinging on to $27,700 for dear life.

But luckily for you we take a deep dive into the BRC-20 craze, and give you 11 useful project updates with some Twitter reads that’ll take your mind off your portfolio.

PS. I’m going to leave this link here to Spotify as we’ve had some pretty cool guests recently including 0xSami from Redacted, the Trader Joe team and Pendle Finance. So have a listen on your next commute/drive or when you’re watching Pepe in disbelief.

🧑‍💻 Join the Discord | 🐥 Follow Twitter | 📊 Sub to YouTube & Spotify

Need to know.
If you’ve only got 2 minutes.

The big story.
🥷 Bitcoin's Dirty Little Secret: BRC-20

DeFi insights.
🖼 0xBets Casino launches end of the week
📅 $190m of longs liquidated yesterday
🦧 Degen corner: $BTC how low will it go?

In the news.
🐮 BTC gas fee leaves El-Salvador citizens rekt 
🐻 Bitboy shills meme coins, marks the top (again)!
👨🏻‍💼 What the FED?! CPI on Wednesday, PPI Thursday

Plus Twitter reads from @blocmatesdotcom, @OuroborosCap8 and @Louround_!

With a special bonus from @DefiScientist_

🔥 The big story.
To make you think.

🥷 Bitcoin's Dirty Little Secret: BRC-20

Bitcoin transactions are PUMPING!

Fees are pumping and the Bitcoin blockchain has finally… after 14 years… come to life.

And that's all thanks to the Ordinals and BRC-20 experiments.

Because let’s be honest, before that… Bitcoin was a ghost chain defended by the maximalists seeking only the most serious and important financial transactions to be made.

To sum it up, Ordinals are the NFTs of Bitcoin and BRC-20 are the memecoins of Bitcoin. Think ERC-20 but for Bitcoin.

New to BRC-20s?! Yeah, me too… so let’s take a dive into wdf BRC-20s are… and why Bitcoin memeseason might be coming up next.

WDF is a BRC-20?

And more importantly… where did they come from?

Created back in March by @domodata, an on-chain dune dash wizard, BRC-20 is an experiment to test the tech which has so far seen over 14,079 BRC-20s being created with $ORDI being the original.

Domo does issue a disclaimer stating that “These will be worthless. Please do not waste money mass minting.” But it's crypto and if there's money to be made then there's going to be apes ready to ape in.

The Rise of the BRC-20 memecoin

Ordinals kicked off the first NFT meme season on Bitcoin earlier in the year and now it’s time to see what BRC-20 can do.

The total number of BRC-20 transactions has been slowly increasing surpassing Ordinal transactions.

Now fast forward 2 months and domodata’s experiment has created an ecosystem of 14,079+ tokens with close to a $1bn total market cap.

Impressive.

We could be on to something here…

Not just that but centralised exchanges are jumping on the bandwagon as Gate.io… you guessed it… list BRC-20 $PEPE and $ORDI.

How and where to mint BRC-20’s?

Unisat.io, that's where.

Here you can create your own BRC-20s, use the UniSat wallet and make trades via the marketplace.

The price of being early is expensive as it would cost me $626 to inscribe 24 $bloc (wen blocmates coin?!) BRC-20s using max sats/vB.

Bitcoin L2 anyone?!

However, those that were early and have been lurking…

Our Take

Along with Bitboy's first Metamask transaction derp moment, does a BTC meme season mark the top to conclude this bullrun, echo bubble chamber, and boredom cycle in the markets before we pack up shop and enjoy the summer?

Memecoins definitely make the blockchain fun and historically have marked the top but long term this is a positive development for the Bitcoin blockchain and I would love to see this feature every cycle.

Michael Saylors's team of BTC maxis are hard at work developing and building cool tech for the lightning network which, again, should give more people a reason to use the network as it becomes cheaper and more brainless to transact.

So, what do you think? Will BRC-20 memes bring life back to Bitcoin? Or just another narrative to fill the boredom of bear market tings?

👀 DeFi insights & project updates.
Project updates, governance reports and industry secrets.

The World of DeFi

• GND Protocol - Add a PEPE/WETH LP pair on Arbitrum. (Twitter)

• Gravita Protocol - Interest-free loans secured LSTs (Liquid Staking Tokens) is a fork of the Liquity Protocol and will be launching soon. (Twitter)

• Level Finance - Are heading multi-chain, will Arbitrum be first? (Twitter)

• 0xBets Casino - Launching on Polygon towards the end of this week. (Twitter)

• Pepes Game - Possible $PEPE partnership? Or $PEPE rewards? We’ll let you decide what their Tweet means. (Twitter)

• Perpy Finance - Update protocol fee structure and will be releasing information on NFT mint date, new revenue streams for xPRY holders and a new Arbitrum partner. (Twitter)

• Sparta DEX - Airdrop and Lockdrop update plus Spartan NFTs revealed. (Twitter)

• Synapse Protocol - Bridges $PEPE to Arbitrum combined with Sushi Swaps liquidity. Is this a sign of bigger things to come for meme coins? (Twitter)

• Thena Finance - Daily trading fees double with their data analytics dashboard being released today. (Twitter)

• Metavault Trade - $MVX token can now be bridged to zkSync Era and will be hosting a Twitter AMA with Velocore “Paving the trading road for zkSync” on May 9th 2PM UTC. (Twitter)

• Morpho Labs - AaveV3-ETH Optimizer goes live on mainnet. (Twitter)

Governance Updates

• AAVE - Passed the vote to deploy V3 on Metis. (Twitter)

• Canto - 3 Separate proposals will be submitted on May 11th to reduce the liquidity mining incentives by 35%. (Canto)

📊 Degen corner.
Charts, smart money or a degen idea.

$BTC, all eyes on you

Eyes, dreams and bucket loads of hopium are focusing back on Bitcoin as it continues to break down as traders ready their suitcases to go away in May. But how low will we go?

Bull case. Bitcoin crabs along in this $27,000 - $30,000 range before Santa comes and rallies us into the New Year.

Bear case. Lose support here heading down to $25,000 then $21,000 to fully recover the green vector candle.

🗞 In the news.
The important bits.

• Bittrex files for bankruptcy as the exchange announces plans to exit the US market. (Coindesk)

• Meme trader paid 64 ETH in txn fees to buy into the token FOUR netting 133 ETH profit. (Twitter)

• ETH validators (and Jaredfromsubway) are the real winners of meme season. On May 6 MEV revenue was at 549.05 ETH and 2,457.73 ETH in gas fees totalling 3,006.78 ETH. (Coindesk)

• Bitboy shills meme coins after using Metamask for the first time to dump his bags (again) on his community. This is exactly what is wrong with crypto right now. (Twitter)

• MakerDAO launches Spark Protocol boosting DAI lending capabilities through Spark Lend from May 9th. (Twitter)

• BTC gas fee leaves El-Salvador rekt as one citizen had to pay $21 to move $100 out of the country. (Twitter)

👨🏻‍💼 What the FED?!

Here’s what’s to come this week from the FED.

🐥 Twitter reads.
In case you missed it.

@blocmatesdotcom brings some calm to the chaos that has been meme season with a Gamma Swap Labs guide.

@OuroborosCap8 are bearish on price action. And did forget to add in “high profile” crypto Twitter accounts shilling under $1m market cap meme coins.

@Louround_ took the time during meme season to do L2 research so you didn’t have to.

Bonus Read because we all didn’t make it during meme season from @DefiScientist_

And on that note, thanks for reading, catcha apes in the next edition!

blocmates team 🫡

🤝 A final word.

A quick word from our super awesome sponsors who help us make this all possible...

Discover how your skills could power the next generation of web3 and blockchain technology. Your next career move could be one you never imagined. Start your search today at Web3nomads.jobs.