New Bitcoin Standard BRC-69 Plummets Data Limit for Ordinals

The innovation is “recursive inscriptions,” which extract information from already existing Bitcoin inscriptions to create newer ones.

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Bitcoin Ordinals continue to boom, with a new token standard launched Monday.

The BRC-69 standard brings with it an innovative way to reduce the time and cost it currently takes to make an inscription.

Known as Bitcoin’s version of NFTs, which allow for non-financial data to be stored on the blockchain, Ordinals previously had a 4-megabyte limit on what could be inscribed on Bitcoin.

BRC-69 looks to bypass that limit, through what’s known as “recursive inscriptions.”

Recursive inscriptions are a mechanism that allows users to extract data from existing inscriptions, and use them to create new ones.

According to the protocol’s GitHub, the BRC-69 token standard is a way of recycling data already inscribed and reducing the current cost by more than 90%.

“The brilliance of BRC69 lies in its simplicity,” tweeted the team at Luminex, the launchpad announcing the new standard. “Minters only need to inscribe a single line of text instead of a full image,” adding that “this text allows the final image to be automatically rendered on all ordinals-frontends, using solely on-chain resources, thanks to recursive inscriptions.”

Bitcoin’s limited blockspace has long been a point of contention, sparking debate when Ordinals launched–which drew huge transaction fees and a bloated blockchain.

According to self-proclaimed NFT historian and Ordinals collector, Leonidas, recursive’s have massive implications.

Since they allow users to elude the 4-megabyte limit, “the sky is the limit,” he tweeted.

WTF are recursive inscriptions?

Here is everything you need to know:

Earlier this year the Ordinals Protocol introduced the ability for anyone to inscribe files fully on-chain onto Bitcoin. These inscriptions are self-contained and unaware of the other files that had been… pic.twitter.com/O3jt6lhaxT

— Leonidas.og (@LeonidasNFT) June 12, 2023

“Bitcoin is essentially getting an internal internet where every file can request data from the other files on Bitcoin,” he said. “It's unclear yet exactly how people will use this but it is undoubtedly an important moment in the history of Bitcoin.”

This is the latest in a series of exciting developments coming from the Ordinals space.

The most recent was Bitmaps, a protocol that offers a way for users to claim ownership over Bitcoin blocks–which has it in the top place for daily Bitcoin inscriptions.