The massive popularity of Bitcoin Ordinals and new meme coins produced on the world's largest blockchain led a coalition of Bitcoin developers to work together to standardize the BRC-20 cryptocurrency token.
The consortium — the newly formed Layer 1 Foundation — announced its new governing body on Monday, which it says is focused on ensuring trust and transparency around the protocol and is critical to its future development.
“We have invited all the major BRC-20 indicators to become partners… and we have officially agreed to this special operating standard and governance resolution that we have written and become the operating principles for BRC-20 governance,” said Isabelle Foken Duke, vice president of the No.1 Foundation, in an interview with Decrypt.
Founded by anonymous BRC-20 creator Domo, the No.1 Foundation includes management participation from Hiro, Alex Labs, Oil Dynamics, Allium Labs and UTXO. Bitcoin wallet developer Unisat and Ordinals aggregator Best in Slot will jointly lead maintenance of the BRC-20 protocol, the Layer 1 Foundation said.
In the resolution, Foundation members pursue a series of goals, including pursuing simplicity in the technical architecture, adopting a security-first approach when making changes to the protocol or indexes, fostering collective dialogue, and considering community changes in development. and making protocol level changes open source.
By publicly announcing their support for the Layer 1 Foundation framework, Foxconn Duke says it hopes to avoid another conflict and the threat of a hard fork of the BRC-20 protocol. If one of the members decided to hard fork BRC-20, she made it clear.
A hard fork refers to irreversible changes in the blockchain. It forces everyone on the network to upgrade to the new software to continue participating.
In January, the BRC-20 community debated whether to implement the Jubilee Update to Bitcoin Ordinals, which Domo said could affect how BRC-20 tokens are indexed. On one side of the argument was Unisat, and on the other was Domo.
Citing safety concerns, Domo advised against the upgrade until Jubilee has been adequately tested.
While the possibility of a hard fork is high, Unisat Wallet founder Lorenzo says that is not the plan.
“If it was our goal to crack the BRC20, there were a lot of favorable moments in the last 10 months that were more important to us,” Lorenzo told Decrypt at the time.
While politics are involved, Foxon-Duke says his ultimate goal is to protect the users of the BRC-20 protocol and put their interests ahead of individual developers.
“In this protocol, we're advocating for real people who have value and will be a voice for them,” said Fox's Duke. “We achieve this by decentralizing management as much as possible, so that no single company takes away the power and influence to make decisions that benefit the company more than consumers.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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