Unisat and Domo are in a tug-of-war over "speed" and "stability"

Author: Bob Bodily, PhD Source: X, @BobBodily

1. Disputes caused by the "Yuanyuan" protocol index

First of all, A brief overview of BRC-20:

BRC-20 is currently the most successful Bitcoin exchangeable token protocol. Over the past year, its trading volume has reached hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. While it's not perfect (uses inefficient coding, adds burden to the unspent transaction output (UTXO) set, has limited functionality), it is extremely easy to deploy and mint tokens, and has sparked controversy on almost all blockchains. Impact on the crypto world.  

Next, a brief introduction to the technical principles:

BRC-20 is a meta-protocol built on the Ordinals meta-protocol. This means Ordinals uses Bitcoin as a full data availability layer and uses off-chain indexers to determine meta-protocol status. BRC-20 uses the Ordinals protocol as a complete data availability layer and uses an off-chain indexer to determine the meta-protocol status. This means that BRC-20 is actually a "meta-meta" protocol because it is built on top of Ordinals.

Complexity of building BRC-20 on Ord:

The technical specifications of the Ordinals protocol have been changing over the past year. Ord is a completely new protocol, so it changes frequently. When you build a token standard on Ord, you add additional risk to your protocol because you have an ever-changing protocol dependency.

This is what happened with Ord 0.8.0 and Ord 0.9.0. Different versions of Ord track inscriptions in slightly different ways, which means that the BRC-20 indexer will report incorrect balances depending on whether it was built on 0.8.0 or 0.9.0. Of course, this is not advisable.

2. unisat VS domo(LF1)

< strong>L1F Solution

Layer 1 Foundation (@L1Fxyz)’s solution is to freeze the Ord protocol version to 0.9.0, to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future. So even though we have the additional "cursed" inscription category, you avoid cross-version incompatibilities by keeping all indexers built on version 0.9.0. This is not a permanent solution, but for now it is very effective in maintaining the stability of the BRC-20.

Unisat hopes to promote the development of the protocol

First, Unisat introduced a black/white module system. This allows people building on BRC-20 (like Unisat) to introduce new functionality in black modules (temporary locations that are not indexed in the main protocol). You can transfer your tokens into the black module, but cannot withdraw them until approved, just like the Bitcoin Space Chain (one-way bridge). Then, recently,Unisat announced that they hope to upgrade the Ord version under the BRC-20 indexer to the latest version (after jubilee). Jubilee is the official release of Ord, after which we will no longer have "cursed" Ordinals (all inscriptions will always have positive numbers).

Key point in the debate: how to upgrade BRC-20

Upgrading the Ord version under the BRC-20 indexer is actually a very good idea. The Ord protocol will be more stable, we will no longer have "cursed" Ordinals, and we will no longer have to worry about balance mismatches and other issues.

• Unisat hopes to launch this upgrade as soon as possible, which is very reasonable,because Unisat is a start-up company. Startups don’t have time to wait. You have to run to find product market fit and build for users.

• L1F wants to delay the upgrade because if we rush it, additional bugs may occur. Best in slot and others have discovered some protocol bugs. This makes sense becauseL1F is a foundation that aims to protect the protocol, so they endorse a slower, more purposeful path to the protocol for upgrades.

Some believe this is a power struggle by the Unisat team trying to control the protocol. While others believe L1F is simply trying to control what should be a more market-driven protocol.

3. Bob’s opinion

Because The BRC-20 agreement is a huge success and we cannot move faster. The start-up phase of BRC-20 is over. BRC-20 is an absolutely massive protocol (total locked value, users, infrastructure, wallets, market) and no one should be able to move fast after this. I like L1F’s approach. Domo has always recognized the importance of protocol stability (BRC-20 has changed very little since its inception), which is an advantage. Easier to integrate. Easier to build. etc. We need decentralization, deliberation and slow-moving consensus and compromise to drive change in the BRC-20 protocol.