Developers of Bitcoin sidechain MVC prepare for BRC-20 DEX launch

The MVC governance token has surged in 2023 to a fully diluted market cap of over $400 million.

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

In an interview with Cointelegraph, MVC chief operating officer Jason Kwok claims to have developed a “1:1 mapping relationship” with Bitcoin on its sidechain. “This essentially creates a parallel version of your Bitcoin assets, such as BRC-20, on MVC,” said Kwok, explaining that the bridge allows users to swap BRC-20 token assets on the MVC sidechain, thus bypassing the high transaction and gas fees required to deploy decentralized applications (DApps) on the Bitcoin mainnet.

“MVC shares the same underlying architecture as Bitcoin, which means the same mnemonic phrases and receiving addresses can be used across both. This significantly reduces the learning curve and enhances user-friendliness.”

In keeping with the spirit of Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, Kwok explains that MVC has no particular founders or corporate headquarters. Instead, the sidechain is a “collaborative endeavor” involving many development teams that form the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Invented by Web3 developer Rodarmor in January, BRC-20 tokens have surged in popularity as one of the largest technological advancements in a 15-year-old blockchain. Bitcoin Ordinals is a numbering system that assigns a unique number to each satoshi, or 1/100 millionth of a Bitcoin (BTC), enabling tracking and transfer. Combined with the inscription process, which adds a layer of data to each satoshi, users can mint unique digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The market cap of BRC-20 tokens has since exceeded $1.5 billion, led by memecoin Ordinals (ORDI), which is not associated with the Ordinals protocol.

As part of MVC’s 2024 roadmap, Kwok says 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. “The meta-contract IDE is capable of compiling TypeScript, a high-level language, into the low-level op_code language on MVC. This process is a critical component in the development of MVC smart contracts and the expansion of BVM [Bitcoin Virtual Machine] DApps,” he said.

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

Kwok stated 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. “Bitcoin ecosystem applications, like wallets and NFT [nonfungible token] markets, can easily add support for MVC without requiring extensive additional development,” said Kwok.