Myth.btc

The New CBRC-20 Token Standard and How We BackdOrd it Onto Unisat

With vers ion 0.10.0 of the Ord client, the new metadata and metaprotocol fields were added to Bitcoin ordinals.

A group known as Cybord used these new fields to create a new fungible token standard called CBRC-20 (CyBORg BRC-20) with the same operational logic as BRC-20 but with operations encoded in CBOR instead of JSON.

This does two notable things:

Frees up the content field for other data (the field where we usually see BRC-20 JSON, .bitmaps, jpegs, etc.)
Makes token operations cheaper because CBOR is more compact than JSON

So instead of inscribing operations in the content field like this (BRC-20 transfer):

{"p":"brc-20","op":"transfer","tick":"ordi","amt":"1000"}

We can inscribe them in the ‘metaprotocol’ field like this (CBRC-20 transfer):

cbrc-20:transfer:BORD=1000

A side effect of doing operations in this new metaprotocol field is that it frees up the content field for other data.

To save on fees, you can leave it empty. Or just inscribe a 0 (as many early adopters did):

But Cybord and the community were creative with it and inscribed images and other kinds of data in the content field.

For example, here is the content field for the $BORD deploy transaction (first CBRC-20 token Cybord deployed):

Cool, right?

A few days later, an indexer and operation validator was spun up, the Discord was actively trading $BORD and other CBRC-20 tokens, and everyone was brainstorming new experiments to do with CBRC-20.

Then on December 16th, we had an idea.

What if we used the newly freed up content field to do two operations on different protocols? We tweeted it out before we even tested it.

Cybord immediately thought of a way to use this that we hadn’t realized: they deployed a token called “SYMM” with both CBRC-20 and BRC-20 and showed everyone how to mint both in one transaction.

Bitcoin fees almost immediately spiked to 400+ sat/vB as everyone wanted to mint the “symmetrical” token, and we came up with a new idea that blew our minds:

If we can do BRC-20 and CBRC-20 operations on the same inscription, that means we can list CBRC-20 token transfers for sale on Unisat (or any market) if we inscribe them with a BRC-20 transfer on the same ordinal.

We immediately started working on this and got it fully working a few hours later, including:

Deployed a BRC-20 “carrier token” called $CBRM whose only purpose was to be the “Trojan Horse” for listing CBRC-20s on Unisat
Created a greasemonkey javascript extension to call the Cybord API and render the CBRC-20 tokens properly on Unisat
Created a tutorial video to show everyone else how to buy and sell them on Unisat with the extension

We kept updating Cybord in the DMs until it was good enough. Then Cybord retweeted us, and it was off to the races.

CBRC-20 listings (visible only with the extension) started showing up on the $CBRM token page on Unisat:

Around 15 sales occurred on this “BackdOrd” CBRC-20 marketplace before we realized someone had created a CBRC-20 marketplace that interfaced directly with the Cybord indexer.

We were also worried people weren’t listening to our advice to still validate purchases with the Cybord API before purchasing, and we didn’t want anyone to buy invalid tokens on accident.

So we deleted the greasemonkey script and told everyone the experiment had concluded:

It was an incredibly fun experiment.

We have no idea all the cool things we can now do with multiple metaprotocol operations (and/or art) on a single Ordinal inscription, but it’s going to be interesting to explore.