Original interview from Isabel Foxen Duke
Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily Golem ( @web3_golem )
Editors Note: In March 2023, Domo launched the BRC-20 token standard. Over the past two years, the Bitcoin ecosystem has also experienced the ups and downs of the crypto industry, from being ignored and questioned to being popular, and finally falling from the crowd. The birth of BRC-20 is undoubtedly epoch-making for the Bitcoin ecosystem, but who is still sticking to the Bitcoin ecosystem and BRC-20?
On the second anniversary of BRC-20, Domo, the founder who never accepts public video interviews, accepted an interview with Isabel Foxen Duke for the first time, talking about his encryption experience, the story before and after the birth of BRC-20, his views on UniSat, and the future development plan of BRC-20. Odaily Planet Daily compiled the original interview as follows, enjoy~
Worked as a data analyst before entering the industry, earned my first pot of gold from NFT Summer
Host: I ’m glad you’re here. This is your first video interview. We’d like to take this opportunity to let the audience know more about your story. I heard that you didn’t pay much attention to Bitcoin before Ordinals and BRC-20. Is that true? What did you do before you got involved in the Ordinals protocol?
Domo: I really didn’t put most of my energy into Bitcoin two years ago, and like most people, it was the Ordinals protocol that brought me back to Bitcoin. Before that, Bitcoin just went up and down in my account, but I didn’t actually do anything.
I came into contact with cryptocurrency relatively late, and only started my crypto journey in 2019, but I was still not deeply involved, mainly learning some basic crypto information through Reddit and YouTube. The real transformation happened in the summer of 2020, when I was working in data science and discovered DeFi innovation on Ethereum, especially projects like Uniswap.
There was very clean data on the chain , and I didn’t even need to spend hours processing it to analyze it. So, the first thing I did was to scrape the Ethereum data for analysis and set up a Telegram bot to track the traders on the chain, and time also proved that they were the most profitable wave of people in the DeFi summer at that time.
Later, I invested my entire monthly salary in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but they almost bankrupted me, so I realized that maybe there was an opportunity only in the crypto-native field. Then around January-February 2021, I found some particularly useful NFT Discords, and I used my on-chain data skills to catch a lot of Alpha in the market madness of NFT Summer, so I had a great financial performance and a good time in 2021.
But I was still looking for a way to join the industry full-time. Until November 2021, I met a guy in an NFT Discord who worked for a large crypto payment company, and then I joined their company and led the teams on-chain data analysis work for the next few years until I released the BRC-20 protocol.
The birth of BRC-20: Bitcoin punks and .stas domains gave great inspiration
Host: Do you remember when you first heard of Ordinals?
Domo: I can’t remember exactly when, but I saw it in January 2023, but I didn’t do anything with it. It wasn’t until I saw it again in February that I realized it was more than just some experimental thing a small group of people were playing with in their basement.
Early Ordinals collectibles also played an important role in the birth of BRC-20. For example, Bitcoin punks actually first invented Fair launch on Bitcoin because we had no way to distribute through smart contracts.
Then the .stas domain was born, which really brought Jason format data to the masses and into the Bitcoin memory pool. I opened my computer at work and found it, and I thought this is really great, we have taken another step forward, the Ordinals protocol is no longer just an art protocol, it can also use Bitcoin as a data availability layer.
The infrastructure is right in front of us, and you can do what you want. So I thought, is there something else we can do? From that moment on, I thought of the Ordinals protocol as a gateway to Bitcoin data availability that is easily accessible to most users regardless of technical ability or background.
Moderator: Before creating the BRC-20 protocol, did you conceive of this protocol with others or go through some community discussions?
Domo: After seeing .sats domains use JSON format on the chain, I saw a tweet from a blogger named redphone . He worked with Delphi Ventures to publish a pseudo-spec, and I think his design will succeed, but it is missing a few key things, but it is still inspiring.
I locked myself in my room for two days and created the BRC-20 protocol, but a lot of the credit goes to redphone . In the next few days, I built the start date and indexer on the data side, but it was the worst indexer ever, it broke after only an hour of startup, but it at least proved that this method is indeed feasible.
It took me a while to figure out two things. One was the hierarchical design of balances, including available balances and transferable balances. The other was how to prove that you own this thing? Because anyone can actually inscribe themselves and transfer money, which also means that anyone can steal anyones balance, so I made a specification that should initially include 4 functions (deployment, minting, transfer and transaction).
Trading was not initially included because, given the circumstances, I felt it was adding unnecessary complexity and that this could be fixed later. But I think this omission was necessary and one of the biggest takeaways from this experience was to keep it simple, and I think this was a key decision.
Host: So you launched this token standard and deployed the first ever inscription and then you tweeted it out and it started getting a lot of attention, what happened in the following week for you?
Domo： I deployed ordi as a test to prove whether this token specification is feasible. But in fact, someone used this protocol before I released the gitbook, so before I released the token standard, someone deployed another token. When I saw it, I wanted to release this token specification as soon as possible.
An hour after BRC-20 was released, my friend sent me a private message saying that the experiment was a failure, so I didn’t sleep well that night. But I still think that ordi may have been minted within 24. They may have used the inscription minting tool or the Ordinals client itself. At that time, I didn’t know who specifically made an indexer to track ordi transactions to check the balance.
Moderator: Why was BRC-20 able to spread so quickly that within about 16 hours of you sending the tweet, people started building tools for this thing?
Domo: I think the core Ordinals community has already noticed previous innovations , such as .sats domains, so when there is something new to try, they are interested. In addition, I think some people have also seen the business opportunities of engraving tools, which can become a cash cow by simply implementing simple batch engraving. In short, from the users perspective, these are the right time and right place factors.
UniSats contribution to BRC-20
Host: When did UniSat become involved in the construction of BRC-20?
Domo: UniSat was originally an engraving tool, and they launched the indexer probably in early April 2023. But I don’t remember how I got in touch with UniSat later, maybe I sent them a private message, or maybe they sent me a private message.
I was getting a lot of private messages from people, a lot of scammers, saying you should deploy ORDI to Ethereum liquidity pools. What attracted me to UniSat was that they had already developed the tools and had been battle-tested, and you could tell there was a solid technical team behind them. The UniSat team came from the BSV community, and in fact most of the early builders and Ordinals players came from there. I think the emergence of indexers also triggered a second wave of OTC craze, because instead of blindly trusting, now you can verify through a middleman whether you actually received it.
Host: So, they participated in the construction voluntarily, and there was no cooperation among you?
Domo: I was really tired at the time, so I was willing to support anyone who volunteered to build. UniSat was the most engaged and capable team at the time, and there were various other teams that helped out in the early days, such as Best In Slot, and Im grateful for their help.
I had discussions with UniSat when they were building the indexer, but I wasn’t involved in the UniSat market. It wasn’t until UniSat built the BRC-20 market in late April that we really got good pricing data, and that was probably the first time I really started paying attention to prices, because OTC trading is usually very unreliable.
BRC-20 feels pressure after its explosion
Host: Do you feel pressure after BRC-20 became popular?
Domo: Yeah, it’s stressful, even though we’ve built the indexer, there’s still a lot of voices on Twitter saying that this is wrong both technically and on Bitcoin fundamentalism.
Before I released BRC-20, I was an “Ethereum guy” and didn’t have the same connections in the Bitcoin community as I did in Ethereum. Frankly speaking, I didn’t know much about Bitcoin at the time. My view of the Bitcoin community at the time was that it was the ideal proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, including open access, freedom, and fairness. So I was thinking about how to emulate Bitcoin’s fairness, freedom, and openness in this experiment, which ultimately led me to make several decisions, which I think is also an important factor in the success of the fair minting function.
But at the time, these negative comments still had a great impact on me. Some people would ask me what I would improve if I were to recreate BRC-20. But in my opinion, BRC-20 is a one-in-a-million success story, and if any design variables were adjusted at the time, the situation could have been reversed. BRC-20 is indeed a very inefficient protocol, and we can improve it, but there are some risks in blindly improving it.
Im glad I didnt follow a lot of that advice and took a slow improvement approach because I believed that only practical ideas would improve the protocol in the long term, and rushing things would only be a stopgap measure.
I didn’t know in advance that the exchange would launch the inscription
Moderator: Before ORDI was listed on centralized exchanges such as OKX, were you involved in the listing on centralized exchanges? Do you know what will happen next?
Domo: I actually didn’t participate, except for Gate, who sent me a private message in advance, but when I woke up, I found that it was already listed. The only thing I can say is that there may be some factors that contributed to the listing. From the perspective of listing on exchanges, 2023 was a special period. Nothing new happened at the beginning of the year, and PEPE was just a flash in the pan. So BRC20 was the star of the market narrative at the time, and it was logical for these exchanges to list the currency.
Also, the vast majority of the tokens held by exchanges are Bitcoin, and my assumption at the time was that if Bitcoin left their exchanges and was traded on-chain on the UniSat market or other markets, then they would have a liquidity bubble. To solve this problem, exchanges can only list these assets and then build tools around them.
BRC-20 Decentralization Road: It is a good thing that BRC-20 will not have Domo in the future, but it is not yet
Moderator: While the indexer built by UniSat is mainstream, Best In Slot also created an indexer. Can you share how Best In Slot got involved, what problems they were trying to solve, and how they tried to index BRC20 in a different way?
Domo: I met Best In Slot at a conference in Singapore in September 2023, and later I might have met again in Miami, I don’t remember the exact time, but we have been chatting for a while. They said they built an indexer, and the team has a strong technical background from Ethereum, and indexing is their expertise.
I was very happy that a super competitor was interested in BRC-20 indexing because there was a saying that BRC-20 was centralized and we needed a federation of multiple indexers. So later we had OPI, which is a more decentralized client that anyone can easily run.
Moderator: When Casey made a major upgrade to the Ordinals protocol, what impact did it have on BRC-20 indexers? How did you respond?
Domo: My first priority is still security. In my opinion, some new upgrades do not improve the protocol and bring risks to us. In the end, the indexer dispute may have caused a commotion due to lack of communication, but UniSat compromised. I am grateful for everyones cooperation. Everyone agreed that any form of fork was not in the best interest of the community, and then found a solution that suited everyones needs and interests.
Later, in order to avoid similar situations from happening again, we created the Layer 1 Foundation. The best use of this organization is to establish some kind of governance rules so that we can handle these decisions in a smarter way in the future. UniSat and Best In Slot are both the main maintainers of this organization and collaborate with each other.
I am very happy with this result. This is how open source protocols should be. Over time, the founders ideas are not necessarily the best. It is healthy for better technology, more experience, and more people committed to the protocol to join. I like this way of development. I feel more like a coordinator. In the future, Domo may no longer be part of BRC20. I think this will be a good thing, but it is obviously not yet.
BRC-20 swap module and programmable module
Moderator: You guys have been talking about two major upgrades to the protocol in the last about 8 or 9 months, the swap module and the programmable module. Can you share what those are?
Domo: The swap module dates back to the summer of 2023, when we realized that we were not trading these assets like homogeneous tokens, but more like NFTs, and any reasonable protocol would strive to improve this user experience, which is why the swap module was born. Of course, we made mistakes at the time and thought that this black-and-white technology was not feasible, but later UniSat and Fractal networks proved that it had a good experience.
But people are talking more about UniSat swap, but this module is not exclusive to UniSat, any team can deploy the swap module and adopt tokens.
Programmable modules I remember talking about it at a Bitcoin summit in Taiwan in 2023, and I think it would make sense if they could solve the problem of Bitcoin adaptability, using UTXO to bind data to Bitcoin, etc.
I think that ultimately programmable protocols will win in the market. Two years later, we are still trading BRC20 tokens the same way we trade NFTs, which is a bad experience. If you are a Solana degen trading on the Bitcoin network, you may want to go back to Solana immediately. We have to adapt to the market, which is why I am interested in programmable modules.
However, for me, the current priority is to make BRC-20 assets survive. Programmable modules and the Single step transfer we have been working on can make BRC-20 better integrated into other ecosystems, so that users do not have to hang on the BRC20 tree, so that the assets being created become the objects that need to be supported, rather than the standard itself.
Moderator: Can programmable modules solve the interoperability problem between BRC-20 and other protocols such as Runes? Or do we still need L2? What do you think?
Domo: There are various solutions, such as centralized cross-chain bridges, L1.5 layers or those L2. Whats interesting is that everyone in the Bitcoin field is making trust assumptions, who should we trust, etc. But if we start from an industry perspective, we should understand the needs of different people. For example, if you are a Bitcoin whale, there may be only a few protocols such as Babylon that can meet your conditions.
But if you are a degen, you dont care about this at all, because you are used to centralization, and you are just looking for Alpha. I dont know how this interoperability game will end up, but I think it is still necessary.
Moderator: Do you think BRC-20 has advantages over some of the other protocols that are developing programmability?
Domo: If BRC-20 does nothing now, I think the most likely scenario is that some programmable protocol emerges and dominates the market, and BRC-20 will not be able to participate because it is not interoperable. But if BRC-20 goes the programmable route, then there is a chance to attract peoples attention again, but this does not mean that it will definitely succeed.
BRC-20 One-Step Transfer
Moderator: As a builder, what problems would you like the community to focus on solving?
Domo: I think a lot of people are only focused on whats happening right now and ignore that there are a lot of interesting things happening in the Bitcoin ecosystem. For example, in a few months or even a year, those Bitcoin VM bridges may create huge yield opportunities like DeFi. If I were a builder, I would work in this direction. Looking back at the early days of Ordinals, it was quite fun to be a part of this industry at that time. People respected each other and were full of optimism. I hope people can get back to that state.
Moderator: You mentioned “Single step transfer” several times. Is this something new that BRC-20 users expect?
Domo: Single-step transfer can abstract the wallet and solve the problem of the number of Bitcoin wallets. It will not only make the user experience better, but it will also make BRC20 easier to connect to other systems than before. Many cross-chain bridge designs are still too complicated for users. Users are used to sending UTXO and the experience is similar to simple cross-chain bridge locking. We even plan to enable lightning channels, etc., but I don’t want to make a commitment yet.
