Sovryn & BRC-20 How to move Forward?

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Hey Sovryn Community!

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about BRC-20 tokens and their skyrocketing popularity in the Bitcoin world. As we look to shape the future of Sovryn, I think we should discuss openly if and how Sovryn can leverage this latest trend that is bringing so much attention and it is not showing signs of stopping. I’d like the community’s input on the importance of BRC-20 tokens and ordinals, their potential use cases, and how we can leverage them effectively.

It is important to note that at the moment Sovryn is ahead of the competition as the main DeFi platform on Bitcoin. Our competitors like Alex (they even change their twitter name to: ALEX - Building the fastest BRC20 DEX) and Stacks are moving quick to capitalize on this new trend. We need to determine if this is a direction Sovryn should go and, if so, what is the best way to do it.

Now, I want to hear from YOU!

What’s your take on the importance of BRC-20 tokens?
How can Sovryn leverage BRC-20 tokens effectively?
Are there any specific use cases or product offerings you think would benefit Sovryn?

Please share your thoughts and ideas. This is your chance to contribute to Sovryn’s future direction.
Looking forward to an engaging and productive conversation!

board meeting 3
board meeting 31024×1024 138 KB

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BRC-20 tokens are largely doomed to memedom however the inscription implications and appetite for protocol adoption of this metalayer “convention” are an opportunity we can not overlook. The fact we can identify individual Sats and ascribe certain properties to them on the base layer, through whatever means or convention, is incredible.

I want to extrapolate on some past work I have done and take it to it’s logical extreme.

right now on RSK i have deployed:

Little Drawlings:

Web3PFP:

TL;DR: Mutable NFTs on IPFS (decentralized storage)

Instead of minting an IPNS address (mutable IPFS) token URI on RSK, we can inscribe a UCAN enabled WNFS string to a Sat on main net. - That’s User-Controlled-Authorization-Network symetric private keys over BROWSER with Web Native File System storage and history with military grade encryption for ALL your files tied to ONE SAT on the base layer of the worlds most secure, decentralized network!

Basically instead of MS paint tier images or profile pictures with an “about me” metadata we could have (for example) encrypted PDF contracts with custody and version history metadata. Or decentralized docusign. Could also easily make on particular sat have all the authorizations via UCAN to change your decentralized everything, there is no limit to the number of WNFS files you can have behind the one Satoshi cabinet or whatever we end up calling it.

Here is an MVP PoC for what I want to do, needs a witness, I just need an RSK address for a Sovryn team member to send it to; then they can sign it too.

ipns://k51qzi5uqu5dij3sx10165jyycvjx6i5fnjicl4fysvr9h7a955sjyis4wktco
ipns://k51qzi5uqu5dkaemq8iehrleu79tgnw5mg7b6ao62k1i8gok7419nsim0dtkqo

https://k51qzi5uqu5dij3sx10165jyycvjx6i5fnjicl4fysvr9h7a955sjyis4wktco.ipns.cf-ipfs.com/

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IPFS is awesome but if NOSTR ever gets storage persistence we can add that.

I’ve done these projects under the label Bedtime Labs which is supposed to mean Bitcoin Ecosystem Development time. I don’t know code so I could use someones help in opening up the github safely if people are interested (there’s a point of centralization with IPFS api but UCANs fix that.)

TL;DR:
Utility ordinal NFT docusign + googledocs… Docusats or BTCnotary… or SatoshiNotary??? hmm

edit: also we won’t be shitting up mainchain with images or extreme bloat, just WNFS string text. v smol

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This is certainly incredibly interesting! I always love all your contributions and ideas! Would love someone more technically minded to join in and elaborate on how this could be leveraged

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What do you think of as the top usecases for this?

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Definitely replacing reliance on things like google docs and docusign would be most apparent in the beginning. In the future the ability to hold one single Sat or group of Sats in a mnemonic recoverable wallet that secretly have UCAN authorization at decentralized contact points throughout the web providing read and write access to an unbounded amount of encrypted data. The Sat is effectively an access key token to all of your encrypted data.

Theoretically, I could inscribe one sat (this isn’t really even needed if we extrapolate the ordinal convention, all sats are already numbered, we can do labelling in off-chain indexer for super private access-key-sats that look no different than normal) with a WNFS URI, that link would be public on mainchain; however, the data behind it would be encrypted and only accessible if you have the keys to the taproot wallet that holds it. Behind that initial WNFS URI could be a whole file SYSTEM, encrypted and backed up on IPFS. ALL your information, all your bookmarks, contacts, backups, apps, you can have a whole operating system tucked away in there… or a backup of your personally trained AI model… it’s unbounded. I want it so people can cross a border with 12 words and pick up where they left off.

It gets really interesting when we start seeing people preload Sat inscriptions with effectively decentralized operating systems and apps. People could purchase these inscribed Sats and add it to their collection of Sat-keys in their wallet. I haven’t thought through all the details yet but I can imagine someone buys one of these preloaded inscriptions, get a phone, WIPE IT/ROOT IT/DEGOOGLE IT (i guess this Sat has keys to the instructions for you to do all of this) get a taproot wallet on it somehow, recover your operating system with all your file backups.

Also the opportunity for anyone to just buy one of these preloaded sats with privacy features/apps/OS and start doing best practices while remaining in clownworld.

Right now off the jump you could set up a service like drop box with inscribed sats, like oh you and your family want a dropbox, take 100 sats and inscribe them all with same thing, divvy up to the 30 members of your family and save the other 70 for next generations… Bam each one of you have access to an encrypted file system for the family.

You also easily have a full html website on IPNS right now, it would be rather easy to set up a decentralized website builder dapp that allows anyone to create a fully functional static site that only they (the inscribe satoshi key holder) can change the information of. No BS with DNS or any other agency or board no KYC nonsense either.

brief overview of the scope of WNFS

Paper co-authored by Marko Vukolic about how Filecoin is anchored to BTC (best effort decentralization in lieu of merge mining with BTC)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3560829.3563563

EDIT:

Watch from 31:19 to ~39:30
-how UCANS and WNFS form a sort of rollup

I think this approach could see a sort of “transparent” layer of Bitcoin emerge.

Hold an inscribed Sat on mainchain taproot wallet that has UCAN write and delegation access over your WNFS data, this UCAN chain can trigger smart contract wallets on L2s like RSK.

A user could acquire one of these access key sats on mainchain, have the BTC go directly through powpeg into a SC on RSK, spin up a SC wallet with the remaining BTC and have their RSK SC wallet controlled via UCAN triggers from whatever device you delegate to (using the master key on BTC main.)

UCANs could be used to delegate to a SC wallets and provide a layer of privacy for BTC users interacting with L2s. WNFS is essentially a decentralized internet, user’s could make their own webpages or interact on other WNFS sites. There could be alternative BTC payment rails within this layer that rival lightning and are settled on whatever layer, LN, RSK, or mainchain. WNFS is more like IPNS than IPFS in that it includes a mutability (redirect/pointer) element but Content Identification CIDs are standard in this area where an offchain protocol (read: hyper-expressive smart contract) could be verified to be authentic based on the CID itself. Kind of a bitcoin native internet layer to a degree.

The killer app for this layer would be a Sovryn Browser wallet (or operating system) that has DNS, IPFS, NOSTR, RNS resolution built in. It would show BTC and other asset balances but you wouldn’t necessarily know or care which chain/protocol they were on unless you elected for that view in UI. Your “apps” would be equivalent of webapps like stacker or cashu… just install the webpage (IPFS/WNFS link) to homescreen type deal. They would operate as hyper-expressive smart contracts; the line kind of blurs, but if it’s tamperproof code that carries out operations that trigger BTC or other token movements on L2s and/or mainchain what else is it?

EDIT #2 (may 16):

this guy gives a ~2 minute rundown of UCAN way better than I can explain it…

This guy’s paper kind of inspired all of my thoughts on this.

BTC native file systems → BTC native internet with decentralized cloud computing where we bring back CPU “mining” except you are just renting CPU power out for BTC payment (probably rBTC I think this whole system is more or less implemented and anchored to Filecoin already, just need to use RSK instead of filecoin and use keys from BTC main address for security and principle.

I’m sure I’m making a ton of assumptions etc but trying to learn as much as possible.

I think something like this is inevitable… the argument can be made it is already built just implemented on filecoin. If this is possible and only requires a few smart contracts deployed on RSK and possibly mainchain I think it could prove to be a great opportunity. In the Sovryn Layers call Yago mentioned our justifications for shamelessly stealing good code; Protocol Labs is not something to overlook, and may not even need to be “stolen,” rather “adopted.” Though it would also be cool to just fork Filecoin or upgrade RSK to have a BTC native decentralized storage and cloud computing.

update:
info on the IPVM decentralized cloud computing execution layer

At this point I can not imagine a world where this does not happen (via protocol labs or a fork of the IPLD)

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There was a discussion about Layers and a Sovryn Chain. There is also talk about building further in support of the DLLR. Both require dev resources. I understand that the BRC20s are an interesting development, but should Sovryn not maintain a certain focus and stay with that focus, at least when it comes to building things?

This is not to say that projects like @huluvublue’s do not deserve Sovryn’s support or attention, it sounds interesting. But perhaps there can be support for these sorts of projects (also FameGuild) without also making plans for Sovryn itself (or the core team) to build things for BRC20s. Can’t do everything, and do it well. Just my two cents.

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I agree, Sovryn needs to keep focus on building Bitcoin DeFi. There’s no need (yet) to divert resources. We’d probably spend as much time arguing abbout resource allocation etc than actually building at this point as we don’t have any actionable plans.

However, if it get’s some more interest, maybe we could make a new Discord channel for discussion of Sovryn Layers or ecosystem additions? Hmm I wonder if we could get a group/corparate type account on some of these AI models, maybe some ones that specialize in code. It’s be awesome to collab with other Sovryn’s fuck around/find out with the AI… might bring in some new users.

Maybe get a Sovryn email server like Nostrplebs we could use that for nostr handles idk I’m just kind of saying stuff that I think is interesting, we should farm/harvest more Sovryn’s energies.

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They are incredibly important. Meme coins and community tokens are easily underestimated and looked down upon; but they can be powerful things, with lasting impact. The BRC20s are the perfect embodiment of these things, their final form. Meme coins and community tokens don’t need smart contract capabilities, they just need to be immutable, and open for anyone to create, and that’s exactly what BRC20s offer.

Sovryn should find a team that is building an indexer, and try to make it part of the Sovryn ecosystemt, or build their own. No need for it to be on RSK. Give the relevant team freedom in how they want to build it. BRC20s need more indexers.

For the future: Sovryn should contribute an indexer. For now: Sovryn should embrace oSov as its own BRC20 that originated outside of the core team, showcasing the decentralized and diverse community of Sovryn, use it for give aways and social media campaigns.

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I’ve not done much research into BRC-20, but I’m led to believe that ordinal data is prunable. (I’m happy to be corrected) If that is the case, I don’t think wasting time/effort/resources on it is advisable.

I’m also seeing a lot of talk about SCR-20/21, which is considered non-prunable data, if that market were to run in the future, that would be worth considering. But for now, IMO brc-20 should be ignored.

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the focus should be partnerships for sovryn’s products. not shitcoinery.

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