Lowering the cost of Bitcoin NFT is a “let the front-end do more or less” problem at this stage of experimentation.
Written by Cookie, Rhythm BlockBeats
High issuance costs have always been one of the reasons affecting the Bitcoin NFT market. Although there have been quite a few BRC-XXX protocols in the market recently, the balance between keeping Bitcoin NFT “original” and reducing issuance costs is better sought after in BRC-1155 and GBRC-721, in my opinion.
BRC-1155: Making Bitcoin “Open Edition” possible
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A few months ago, ERC-1155’s “Open Edition” art NFT on Ethereum became a “small mainline” in the market for a period of time. The improvement of its infrastructure and the continuous progress of “art gamification” gameplay ultimately made “Open Edition” successful. Attracted market attention.
There are pain points in realizing “Open Edition” on Bitcoin, especially when the NFT content type is large-sized animation, audio, and even video files. The high engraving cost can only be borne by one of the creators or collectors. This is almost hopeless for the development of “Open Edition” on Bitcoin-the creator needs to bear the risk in advance (paying high engraving costs without being able to sell it), so they resist issuing “Open Edition” works of art on Bitcoin, and collectors also resist participating due to high engraving costs.
To make the development of “Open Edition” on Bitcoin possible, both costs must be reduced at the same time. The core idea of BRC-1155 is that if we can accept JSON code inscriptions like BRC-20 to confirm the ownership of the same work of art, as a way to own a work of art stored on Bitcoin, then we don’t need to spend several times or more Gas To repeatedly engrave an image/audio/video/other file, just spend extremely low Gas to obtain a “voucher”, and then let the index render the corresponding content based on the on-chain inscription pointed to by the “voucher” inscription.
BRC-20 + ERC-1155 = BRC-1155
The costs of creators and collectors are greatly reduced. For creators, only one inscription of an image/audio/video/other file needs to be engraved as the “original version”, and at the same time, a “deployment” inscription needs to be engraved.
Example of “Deployment” Inscription
The meanings of the key words in the above “Deployment” Inscription example are as follows:
“p”: Protocol type. This keyword must be included and defines that the operation is based on the BRC-1155 protocol to help index and identify BRC-1155 events.
“op”: Event type. This keyword must be included and defines the event type, which is Deploy, Mint, Burn, or Fractionalize.
“abbrev”: Abbreviation of the BRC-1155 series name. This keyword must be included and defines the abbreviation for the BRC-1155 series name, which cannot exceed 10 characters.
“inscription”: Index pointing. This keyword must be included and defines which inscription (based on the inscription number) of the BRC-1155 series will be used for content rendering on-chain. For example, if you want to render the content of Inscription #123, then you would fill in “123”.
Additionally, creators can include other keywords in the “Deployment” Inscription to achieve functions such as determining the total supply, the number of “tokens” that each Mint Inscription can represent, and adding additional descriptive information (see BRC-1155 manual for details).
For collectors, just engrave a “Mint” Inscription to obtain ownership of the corresponding on-chain Inscription:
Example of “Mint” Inscription. As you can see, the text engraved is only 81 bytes, greatly reducing costs
Based on the above example, the collector obtains ownership of Inscription #8019479, which has a size of 57.6 KB
Not only does this lower the cost of “Open Editions”, but BRC-1155 also provides the “Burn” function to achieve “art gamification” gameplay. Currently, the developer of BRC-1155, @ivantkf, has partnered with the Bitcoin NFT project Bitcoin Pizzas and PixelBirds SBlockingrrow to establish the BRC-1155 Foundation, and indexing and more feature improvements are underway. Bitcoin Pizzas and PixelBirds SBlockingrrow have also used BRC-1155 to complete the issuance of “Open Edition” projects.
GBRC-721: Store various features as Base 64 on the chain and assemble them on the frontend
Some BRC-XXX protocols that use IPFS to achieve file rendering and completion of files are considered to break the “original” nature of Bitcoin NFTs. GBRC-721 uses a clever solution to maintain the all-on-chain storage feature of Bitcoin NFTs – converting image files into Base 64 strings and writing them into the “deployment” inscription, which is then engraved onto the chain. The front-end reads the Base 64 strings of each feature stored in the “deployment” inscription pointed to by the “casting” inscription, and converts them back into images, combining them into a complete image.
Example of a “deployment” inscription. Each feature image is converted into a Base 64 string and written to the “deployment” inscription, such as the blue background and the robot’s antenna. Engraving the “deployment” inscription is equivalent to storing each feature’s image on the Bitcoin chain.
Example of a “casting” inscription. The front-end reads the various features contained in the “deployment” inscription (t_ins field, which represents the Inscription ID that the “casting” inscription points to), and completes the image stitching based on the feature array (a field, which represents the corresponding features that the front-end will use to assemble the complete image).
The GBRC-721 protocol was proposed by the founder of the Bitcoin NFT project DogePunks, @0xJerry543, who also created a new series called OrdiBots to demonstrate the protocol.
Conclusion
BRC-1155 and GBRC-721 both show us a new way of thinking – BRC-20’s JSON code-style inscriptions can not only be used for asset issuance, but also make the gameplay of Bitcoin NFTs more diverse. At the same time, since BRC-1155 and GBRC-721 Mint are both JSON code texts, if you participate in the casting of related projects, you will not receive images, but rather text-type inscriptions like BRC-20 Tokens.
To obtain a more complete user experience, we need to wait for the indexing of these protocols, as well as the recognition of these protocols by wallets/exchanges and their corresponding front-end adaptations. At the same time, we can also say that reducing the cost of Bitcoin NFTs is a “letting the front-end do more or less” issue in the current stage of experimentation.
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