Interpretation of BRC-1155 and GBRC-721 Protocols: New Ways to Use Bitcoin NFTs, Minting Fees as Low as $5

Original: 《Minting NFTs on Bitcoin for just $5? Understanding BRC-1155 and GBRC-721》

Author: Cookie, Rhythm BlockBeats

High issuance costs have always been one of the reasons affecting the Bitcoin NFT market. Although there have been more BRC-XXX protocols appearing in the market recently, I believe that BRC-1155 and GBRC-721 have found a better balance between maintaining the "original flavor" of Bitcoin NFTs and reducing issuance costs.

BRC-1155: Making Bitcoin "Open Edition" Possible

A few months ago, the "Open Edition" art NFTs on Ethereum's ERC-1155 became a "minor storyline" in the market for a while. The improvement of its infrastructure and the continuous advancement of "art gamification" gameplay ultimately made "Open Edition" successfully attract market attention. (Recommended reading: The "Art Gamification" of NFTs: Burn-Redeem and Coupons)

There are pain points in realizing "Open Edition" on Bitcoin, especially when the NFT content types are larger GIFs, audio, or even video files. The high minting costs can only be borne by either the creator or the collector, which makes the development of "Open Edition" on Bitcoin almost hopeless. Creators resist issuing "Open Edition" art on Bitcoin due to the need to bear risks upfront (incurring high minting costs without being able to sell), and collectors also resist participation due to high minting costs.

To make the development of "Open Edition" on Bitcoin possible, it is necessary to lower costs for both parties. The core idea of BRC-1155 is that if we can accept confirming ownership of the same artwork through JSON code inscriptions like BRC-20, as a way to own an artwork stored on Bitcoin, then there is no need to spend several times or more on Gas to repeatedly mint an image/audio/video/other file. Instead, we only need to spend a very low amount of Gas to obtain a "certificate," and then let the index render the corresponding content based on the on-chain inscription pointed to by the "certificate."

BRC-20 + ERC-1155 = BRC-1155

The costs for both creators and collectors are greatly reduced. For creators, they only need to mint one inscription of an image/audio/video/other file as the "original" being pointed to, and then mint another "deployment" inscription.

Example of a "Deployment" Inscription

The meanings of the keywords in the above "deployment" inscription example are as follows:

• "p": Protocol type. A required keyword that defines the operation based on the BRC-1155 protocol, helping the index identify and process BRC-1155 events.
• "op": Event type. A required keyword that defines the event type, which can be Deploy, Mint, Burn, or Fractionalize.
• "abbrev": Abbreviation of the BRC-1155 series name. A required keyword that defines the abbreviation of the BRC-1155 series name, which cannot exceed 10 characters.
• "inscription": Index pointing. A required keyword that defines which inscription (based on inscription number) the BRC-1155 series will obtain on-chain for content rendering. For example, to render the content of Inscription #123, you would fill in "123."

Additionally, creators can add some other keywords in the "deployment" inscription to determine the total supply, the number of "certificates" each Mint inscription can represent, and to add extra descriptive information, etc. (For details, please refer to the BRC-1155 manual.)

For collectors, they only need to mint a "minting" inscription to obtain ownership of the corresponding on-chain inscription:

"Minting" inscription example. The size of the inscribed text is only 81 bytes, significantly reducing costs.

Based on the above example, the collector has obtained ownership of Inscription #8019479, which is 57.6 KB in size.

Not only has BRC-1155 reduced the costs of "Open Edition," but it also provides a "Burn" function to achieve "art gamification" gameplay. Currently, the developer of BRC-1155, @ivantkf, has collaborated with the Bitcoin NFT projects Bitcoin Pizzas and PixelBirds Sparrow to establish the BRC-1155 Foundation, and the index and more functional improvements are underway. Bitcoin Pizzas and PixelBirds Sparrow have also attempted to issue "Open Edition" projects using BRC-1155.

GBRC-721: Storing Features on Base 64 On-Chain, Front-End Assembly

Some BRC-XXX protocols that use IPFS to point to and complete file rendering are considered to undermine the "original flavor" of Bitcoin NFTs. GBRC-721 employs a clever solution to maintain the full on-chain storage characteristics of Bitcoin NFTs—converting image files into Base 64 strings and writing them into the "deployment" inscription on-chain. The front end reads the Base 64 strings of various features stored in the "deployment" inscription pointed to by the "minting" inscription and converts them back into images, assembling a complete image.

Example of a "Deployment" Inscription. You can see that the images of various features have been converted into Base 64 strings and written into the "deployment" inscription, such as the blue background and the robot's antenna. Minting the "deployment" inscription is equivalent to storing the images of various features on the Bitcoin chain.

Example of a "Minting" Inscription. You can see that the front end will read the various features contained in the pointed "deployment" inscription (the t_ins field, representing the Inscription ID of the pointed "deployment" inscription) and complete the image assembly based on the feature array (the a field, representing that the front end will assemble a complete image based on these corresponding features).

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 both present us with a new idea—the JSON code inscriptions of BRC-20 can not only be used for asset issuance but can also diversify the gameplay of Bitcoin NFTs. At the same time, since what is minted by BRC-1155 and GBRC-721 are all JSON code texts, if you participate in the minting of related projects, what you receive will not be images, but text-type inscriptions like BRC-20 Tokens.

To gain a more complete user experience, we need to wait for the indexes of these protocols to be launched, and we also need to wait for wallets/marketplaces to recognize these protocols and adapt their front ends accordingly. At the same time, we can say that reducing the costs of Bitcoin NFTs, based on current attempts, is a question of "whether to let the front end do more or less."