BRC-20 VS ARC-20

The greatest advantage of the BRC-20 standard is that retail investors can obtain tokens even earlier than the primary market, meaning that retail investors can earn higher profits than the secondary market, just like institutional investors.

However, BRC-20 has inherent deficiencies and many problems. A perfect replacement for the BRC-20 standard is the ARC-20 protocol. The ARC-20 protocol is not an upgraded version of BRC-20 but a completely different protocol. On the surface, ARC-20 is also based on the issuance of inscriptions on Bitcoin. In reality, ARC-20 does not require indexers like BRC-20, and the token Mint process adopts a POW mechanism. This ensures that, during the token’s initialization process, the community’s every user can hold the token to the greatest extent.

Inscriptions are actually the most perfect token issuance method for Web3 decentralization, meaning that the traditional multi-round financing method for tokens is completely overturned. Because of inscriptions, DeFi has become genuinely valuable in the realm of Web3.

What is Quark?

ATOM is the first inscription under the ARC-20 standard, followed by the community’s subsequent releases of inscriptions like Electron, Proton, etc. Some speculate that this model is a groundwork for the future ARC-20 ecosystem and may represent tokens with different applications and functions. Currently, all these tokens have a blue logo, whether this matches the speculation is not yet clear.

So Quark tokens don’t have any actual functionality. Because the token’s issuance is relatively large and the tokens are obtained through POW mining, theoretically, the initial number of token holders can reach 20,000. Because mining tokens doesn’t require continuously increasing the Gas Fee like BRC-20, half of the users only noticed after more than 40% of the tokens were mined. This is why the number of token holders is only 16,000, not the theoretical 20,000.

A large initial token holding quantity has very significant advantages for the token’s price including: 1. The token is not easily sold under pressure. 2. The token is strongly associated with the community. That is, the community will pay for the token’s applications.

This is also why tokens held by institutions tend to slide in price after going live on top-tier CEXs, while tokens with a very high initial number of holders tend to see price increases. Currently, Quark has the highest number of holders among ARC-20 tokens, similar to BRC-20’s SATS, the token’s price will skyrocket if it goes live on top-tier CEXs.

How to mine ARC-20 tokens

Because all the initial Quark tokens have been mined, meaning all the initial tokens have been distributed. So the following is a general mining tutorial for ARC-20.

If other new tokens are issued under the ARC-20 standard, just replace the token name.

Step 1: Download the nodejs script from nodejs.org

Step 2: Install nodejs

Step 3: Download the official mining program from atomicals https://github.com/atomicals/atomicals-js

Step 4: Unzip the file to a local folder

Step 5: Open the unzipped folder in a new terminal using CMD command for Windows or Open Folder in New Terminal for Mac.

Step 6: In the command window opened in step five, run npm install -g yarn for Windows, or sudo npm install -g yarn for Mac (to add Yarn package)

Step 7: Run yarn install (to start installing yarn)

Step 8: Run yarn run build (to run yarn build)

Step 9: Run yarn cli wallet-init (to create an ARC-20 wallet)

After completing all the above basic operations, you need to record the wallet’s mnemonic phrase. Or back up the wallet.json file in the folder. The mnemonic phrase can also be imported into Atomical’s wallet for token transfers.

Step 10: Transfer some BTC into the newly created wallet for Fund Account, amount at your discretion.

Step 11: Run yarn cli mint-dft quark –satsbyte 100 to start mining the quark token

Quark can be replaced with other token names. The digit after Satsbyte is the current Gas Fee for Bitcoin, which can be checked at https://mempool.space/

About mining difficulty:

Mining difficulty is divided into 4, 6, 8 digits. Currently, 4 digits of mining difficulty can be mined in 1 minute with a home computer, 6 digits take several hours, and 8 digits take a week to several months. The difficulty will be displayed during mining. Because mining uses Bitcoin’s child-payment algorithm, there are cases where a 6-digit difficulty can mine an inscription in 5 minutes.

About the price prediction of the ARC-20 standard

ARC-20’s scalability has more advantages than BRC-20, allowing more applications to be implemented on Bitcoin. However, only inscriptions and NFTs can be realized with BRC-20.

But as Web3 has very strong decentralization and community factors, it is unlikely that BRC-20 will be completely replaced by ARC-20. Ordi and Bitcoin Frog, as two NFTs of BRC-20 (although Ordi is an inscription), are valued by the community for their collectible value.

The market cap prediction for ARC-20’s leading token ATOM is only 1/5 of Ordi’s.