BRC-20

Overview

BRC-20 is a token convention built on Bitcoin inscriptions rather than a native Bitcoin token standard or smart-contract interface. Deploy, mint, and transfer operations are represented in inscription data, while off-chain indexers interpret the ordered history and calculate balances. Bitcoin consensus validates the underlying transactions and inscriptions but does not enforce BRC-20 token rules. Indexer differences, malformed operations, transfer inscription handling, and reorganization behavior can therefore produce inconsistent views if implementations do not follow the same convention.

Wallets and marketplaces should identify the exact ticker, inscription history, indexer rules, and transfer workflow. Sending ordinary bitcoin does not transfer a BRC-20 balance automatically. Payment systems need compatible indexing and should treat ticker names as non-unique labels rather than authenticated asset identifiers. A published standard does not prove universal adoption, safe implementation, or activation on a particular blockchain or payment network. Teams adopting BRC-20 should track errata, compatibility changes, and the deployed software versions that enforce it.

Operational records for BRC-20 should retain the version and configuration used for each relevant transaction or message. This allows reproducible debugging when a later upgrade changes parsing, validation, signing, or interoperability behavior.

Draft, final, optional, and network-activated specifications have different authority, and similarly named deployments may support different subsets or extensions. BRC-20 should be implemented against an exact document revision, status, and activation context. Conformance to BRC-20 requires more than matching a field name or example. Implementations should validate normative requirements, encodings, error behavior, security conditions, and test vectors, including malformed and boundary inputs that ordinary happy-path tests miss.