Original Text: “Creating NFTs on Bitcoin for only $5? Learn about BRC-1155 and GBRC-721” by Cookie, BlockBeats
High issuance costs have always been one of the reasons affecting the Bitcoin NFT market. Although there have been many BRC-XXX protocols in the market recently, I believe that the balance between keeping the “original flavor” of Bitcoin NFTs and reducing issuance costs is best achieved by BRC-1155 and GBRC-721.
BRC-1155: Making “Open Edition” on Bitcoin possible
A few months ago, ERC-1155’s “Open Edition” art NFTs on Ethereum became a “small main line” in the market for a period of time. The improvement of its infrastructure and the continuous progress of “art gamification” gameplay eventually made “Open Edition” attract attention in the market. (Recommended reading: “Art Gamification” of NFTs: Burn-Redeem and Lottery)
There are pain points in realizing “Open Edition” on Bitcoin, especially when the NFT content type is large animations, audio, or even video files. The high engraving cost can only be borne by either the creator or the collector, making the development of “Open Edition” on Bitcoin almost hopeless-the creator is reluctant to issue “Open Edition” artworks on Bitcoin because they need to bear the risk in advance (paying high engraving costs without being able to sell), and the collector also resists participation due to high engraving costs.
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In order to make the development of “Open Edition” on Bitcoin possible, both parties’ 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 artwork, as a way to own an artwork stored on Bitcoin, then we do not need to spend several times or even more Gas to repeatedly engrave an image/audio/video/other files. We only need to spend extremely low Gas to obtain a “voucher”, and then let the index render the corresponding content according to the on-chain inscription pointed to by the “voucher” inscription.
BRC-20 + ERC-1155 = BRC-1155
Both the cost for creators and collectors have been greatly reduced. For creators, only one image/audio/video/other file needs to be engraved as the “original” to be referenced, along with another “deployment” engraving.
Example of "deployment" engraving
The meanings of the key words in the above “deployment” engraving example are as follows:
“p”: Protocol type. This keyword must be included, which defines the operation based on the BRC-1155 protocol, helping to index and identify BRC-1155 events.
“op”: Event type. This keyword must be included, which defines the event type, either Deploy, Mint, Burn, or Fractionalize.
“abbrev”: BRC-1155 series name abbreviation. This keyword must be included, which defines the BRC-1155 series name abbreviation and cannot exceed 10 characters.
“inscription”: Index pointing. This keyword must be included, which defines which inscription (based on the inscription number) will be rendered on the chain for the BRC-1155 series. For example, if you want to render the content of Inscription #123, then you should fill in “123”.
In addition, creators can also include other keywords in the “deployment” engraving to achieve functions such as determining the total supply, the number of “vouchers” that each Mint engraving can represent, and adding additional descriptive information. (For details, please refer to the BRC-1155 manual)
For collectors, only a “Mint” engraving needs to be engraved to obtain ownership of the corresponding on-chain engraving:
Example of "Mint" engraving. You can see that the size of the engraved text is only 81 bytes, and the cost is greatly reduced
According to the example above, the collector has obtained ownership of Inscription #8019479, which is 57.6 KB in size.
Not only has the cost of “Open Edition” been reduced, BRC-1155 will also provide the “Burn” function to realize the “art gamification” gameplay. Currently, the developer of BRC-1155, @ivantkf, has cooperated with the Bitcoin Pizzas NFT project and PixelBirds SBlockingrrow to establish the BRC-1155 Foundation. Indexing and more feature improvements are being promoted. Bitcoin Pizzas and PixelBirds SBlockingrrow have also used BRC-1155 to complete the “Open Edition” project issuance attempt.
GBRC-721: Convert Each Feature to Base 64 for On-chain Storage, Assemble on the Front-end
Some BRC-XXX protocols are believed to have violated the “original flavor” of Bitcoin NFTs by using IPFS to achieve pointing and file rendering. GBRC-721 uses a clever solution to maintain the full on-chain storage feature of Bitcoin NFTs – converting image files to Base 64 strings and writing them into the “deployment” inscription to be engraved on the chain. The front-end reads the Base 64 strings of each feature stored in the “deployment” inscription pointed to by the “casting” inscription, converts them back into images, and combines them into a complete image.
Example of a “deployment” inscription. As you can see, each feature image is converted to a Base 64 string and written into the “deployment” inscription, such as the blue background and the robot’s antenna. Engraving the “deployment” inscription is equivalent to storing each feature image on the Bitcoin chain.
Example of a “casting” inscription. As you can see, the front-end reads the various features contained in the “deployment” inscription (the t_ins field, which represents the Inscription ID pointing to the “deployment” inscription), and completes the image assembly based on the feature array (the a field, which represents the features that the front-end will assemble into a complete image).
The GBRC-721 protocol was proposed by @0xJerry543, the founder of the Bitcoin NFT project DogePunks, who also created a new series called OrdiBots to demonstrate the protocol.
Conclusion
BRC-1155 and GBRC-721 have both shown us a new approach – the JSON code inscription of BRC-20 can not only be used for asset issuance, but also can make Bitcoin NFT gameplay more diverse. At the same time, since both BRC-1155 and GBRC-721 Mint out JSON code texts, if you participate in the casting of related projects, you will not get images, but rather text-type inscriptions like BRC-20 Tokens.
To achieve a more complete user experience, we need to wait for these protocols to be indexed and for wallets/trading markets to recognize and adapt them accordingly. At the same time, we can also say that reducing the cost of Bitcoin NFTs is a question of “whether to make the front-end do more or less” in the current stage of experimentation.
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