As part of its Q1 2024 strategy, Bitcoin side-chain MicroVisionChain (MVC) developers launched a BRC-20 DEX. MVC COO Jason Kwok said that its sidechain had a “1:1 mapping relationship” with Bitcoin.
“This essentially creates a parallel version of your Bitcoin assets, such as BRC-20, on MVC,” said Kwok. The bridge lets users swap BRC-20 token assets on the MVC sidechain without the high transaction and gas fees needed to deploy DApps on the Bitcoin mainnet. Kwok says MVC has no founders or headquarters, like Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s creator.
The sidechain is a “collaborative endeavor” amongst numerous Bitcoin ecosystem development teams. Web3 developer Rodarmor invented BRC-20 coins in January, which have become one of the biggest technological advances in a 15-year-old blockchain.
Bitcoin Ordinals gives each satoshi, or 1/100 millionth of a bitcoin, a unique number for tracking and transmission. With the inscription process, which adds data to each satoshi, users can manufacture unique Bitcoin blockchain assets.
“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.”
BRC-20 tokens now have a market worth of over $1.5 billion, led by memecoin Ordinals (ORDI), unrelated to Ordinals. MVC’s 2024 roadmap includes a meta-contract integrated development environment (IDE) to migrate DApps from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the Bitcoin sidechain, according to Kwok.
“The meta-contract IDE can compile TypeScript into MVC’s low-level op_code language. He added that this method is crucial to MVC smart contract development and BVM DApp expansion. BVM attempts to add Turing-complete smart contracts to Bitcoin.
This can be done by “incorporating additional OP_CODES into Bitcoin’s original structure and redefining the method of generating underlying transaction IDs,” according to Kwok. Developer Trustless Market, a Uniswap v2 fork that enabled $500,000 in swaps in three days, is also using the method.
Kwok noted that layer-2 solutions like the Bitcoin Lightning Network address scalability and cheap fees but cannot integrate Bitcoin into the DeFi ecosystem. MVC support may be added to Bitcoin ecosystem products like wallets and NFT marketplaces without considerable development, said Kwok.
MVC’s roadmap for Q1 2024. Source: MVC