Developers Get Ready for BRC-20 DEX Launch with MVC Bitcoin Sidechain

MicroVisionChain (MVC) Unveils BRC-20 DEX

Developers of Bitcoin side-chain MicroVisionChain (MVC) have announced the launch of a BRC-20 decentralized exchange (DEX) as part of its roadmap for Q1 2024.

According to MVC chief operating officer Jason Kwok, the sidechain has a “1:1 mapping relationship” with Bitcoin, allowing users to trade BRC-20 token assets on the MVC sidechain without paying the high transaction and gas fees required to deploy decentralized applications (DApps) on the Bitcoin mainnet.

As an open-source project, MVC is a collaborative effort by many different development teams from the Bitcoin ecosystem, in line with the vision of Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

BRC-20 tokens, created by Web3 developer Rodarmor in January, have become increasingly popular as one of the most significant technological innovations in the 15-year history of the blockchain. Bitcoin Ordinals is a numbering system that assigns each satoshi, or 1/100 millionth of a Bitcoin (BTC), a unique number, allowing tracking and transfer. In combination with the inscription process, which adds a layer of data to each satoshi, users can create unique digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Integrating Bitcoin Into DeFi Ecosystem

The market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens has surpassed $1.5 billion, with memecoin Ordinals (ORDI) being the leader, though it is not related to the Ordinals protocol.

As part of MVC’s 2024 roadmap, Kwok stated that the project is also developing a meta-contract integrated development environment (IDE) that would enable the migration of DApps from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to MVC’s Bitcoin sidechain. He added that the meta-contract IDE can compile TypeScript, a high-level language, into the low-level op_code language on MVC. This process is a crucial step in the creation of MVC smart contracts and the growth of BVM [Bitcoin Virtual Machine] DApps.

BVM is a project that seeks to integrate the functionality of Turing-complete smart contracts into the Bitcoin architecture. Kwok explains that this can be achieved by “incorporating additional OP_CODES into Bitcoin’s original structure and redefining the method of generating underlying transaction IDs.” This process is also being adopted by developers Trustless Market, a Uniswap v2 fork that enabled $500,000 worth of crypto swaps in its first three days.

Kwok noted that while current layer-2 solutions like the Bitcoin Lightning Network address issues related to scalability and low fees, they cannot onboard Bitcoin into the greater decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. He said that “Bitcoin ecosystem applications, like wallets and NFT [nonfungible token] markets, can easily add support for MVC without requiring extensive additional development.”