Bitcoin sidechain MicroVisionChain (MVC) developers have unveiled the BRC-20 decentralized exchange (DEX) as part of its roadmap for Q1 2024.
Jason Kwok, MVC’s chief operating officer, claimed in an interview with Cointelegraph that the sidechain had developed a “1:1 mapping relationship” with Bitcoin. “This essentially creates a parallel version of Bitcoin assets like BRC-20 on MVC,” Kwok said. The bridge will allow users to swap BRC-20 token assets on MVC sidechains, allowing for high transaction rates. He explained that gas can be bypassed. This is the fee required to deploy a decentralized application (DApp) on the Bitcoin mainnet.
“MVC shares the same basic architecture as Bitcoin. This means that the same mnemonic phrase and receiving address can be used in both. This significantly reduces the learning curve and improves user-friendliness.”
In the spirit of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Kwok explains that MVC has no particular founder or headquarters. Instead, sidechains are a “collaborative effort” involving many development teams that form the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The BRC-20 token, invented by Web3 developer Rodarmor last January, has surged in popularity as one of the biggest technological advancements in the 15-year-old blockchain. Bitcoin Ordinals is a numbering system that assigns a unique number to each satoshi, or 100 millionth of a Bitcoin (BTC), allowing it to be tracked and transferred. Combined with the inscription process, which adds a layer of data to each satoshi, users can create unique digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens has since surpassed $1.5 billion, led by memecoin Ordinals (ORDI), which is not affiliated with the Ordinals protocol.
As part of MVC’s 2024 roadmap, Kwok said the project is also developing a meta-contract integrated development environment (IDE) that can migrate DApps from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to MVC’s Bitcoin sidechain. “The meta-contract IDE can compile TypeScript, a high-level language, into the low-level op_code language of MVC. “This process is a critical component in developing MVC smart contracts and scaling Bitcoin Virtual Machine (BVM) DApps,” he said.
BVM aims to integrate the functionality of Turing-complete smart contracts into the Bitcoin architecture. Kwok said this could be achieved “by incorporating additional OP_CODES into Bitcoin’s original structure and redefining how the default transaction ID is generated.” This process is also being adopted by the developers of Trustless Market, a Uniswap v2 fork that enabled $500,000 worth of swaps in the first three days.
Kwok said that while current layer 2 solutions, such as the Bitcoin Lightning Network, solve problems related to scalability and low fees, they cannot integrate Bitcoin into the larger decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. “Bitcoin ecosystem applications such as wallets and non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces can easily add support for MVC without extensive additional development,” Kwok said.
Related: Bitcoin Ordinals ORDI Token Surpasses $1 Billion Market Cap After 850% Monthly Rise