BRC-69 Token Standard Promises To Reduce Ordinals Fees By 90%

Luminex, a launchpad for Bitcoin Ordinals, has released a modified version of the BRC-20 token standard, claiming a 90% reduction in minting costs.

With transaction fees on the rise, Luminex hopes reducing minting fees will help to sustain the growth of Ordinals on the network. Luminex said its new recursive BRC-69 token standard requires that only a single line of text is inscribed to the blockchain rather than a full image, driving substantial fee savings for minters.

“As the number of inscriptions grows, Bitcoin block spaces become increasingly scarce and costly,” Luminex tweeted. “[BRC-69] allows the final image to be automatically rendered on all ordinals-frontends, using solely on-chain resources, thanks to recursive inscriptions.”

The launch comes after Bitcoin’s on-chain activity exploded to new all-time highs in May amid the surging popularity of Ordinals.

Ordinals use an inscription method used to create NFT-like assets on Bitcoin, which also enabled the creation of BRC-20 fungible tokens, giving rise to memecoin trading on the network.

BRC-20 tokens currently represent a market cap of $262M, down from nearly $1B in May, according to CoinGecko. The sector drove $20.7M worth of trades over the past 24 hours.

Daily Bitcoin transactions have dropped off to 328,000 after tagging a record high of more than 600,000, according to Ycharts.

Luminex added that BRC-69 supports new functions, such as allowing collections to launch without revealing the tokens beforehand and scheduling on-chain reveals.

Recursive ordinal inscriptions were first launched on June 10 to overcome limits created by Bitcoin’s four-megabyte block size. The technique allows ordinals to reference the features of other tokens from a collection.

For example, without using recursive inscription, the features of every single token within an NFT collection must be individually inscribed to the blockchain. By contrast, recursive inscription allows individual traits of each token within a collection to be programmatically rendered, reducing on-chain fees and storage costs for users.