Original interview from Isabel Foxen Duke

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily Golem

On March 16, 2023, Domo launched the BRC-20 token standard. Over the past two years, the Bitcoin ecosystem has also experienced the ups and downs of the crypto industry, falling from the crowd after a period of hype.

The birth of BRC-20 is undoubtedly epoch-making for the Bitcoin ecosystem.

On the second anniversary of BRC-20, Domo, the founder who never accepts public video interviews, accepted an interview with Isabel Foxen Duke for the first time, talking about his encryption experience, the story before and after the birth of BRC-20, his views on UniSat, and the future development plan of BRC-20. Odaily Planet Daily compiled the original interview as follows, enjoy~

Host: Glad to have you, Isabel. This is the first time he’s agreed to do a video interview, so we’re very lucky to have him.

We’d like to take this opportunity to let the audience know more about your story. I heard that you didn’t pay much attention to Bitcoin before Ordinals and BRC-20. Is that true? What did you do before you got involved in the Ordinals protocol?

Isabel: Yeah, I didn’t really put most of my energy into Bitcoin two years ago, and like most people, it was the Ordinals protocol that brought me back to Bitcoin. Before that, I had some Bitcoin in my account and it went up and down but I didn’t actually do anything.

I came into contact with cryptocurrency relatively late, starting my crypto journey in 2019, but I was still not deeply involved, mainly learning some basic crypto information through Reddit and YouTube. The real transformation happened in the summer of 2020, when I was working in data science and discovered DeFi innovation on Ethereum, especially projects like Uniswap.

There was very clean data on-chain and I didn’t even need to spend hours processing it to analyze it. So, the first thing I did was to scrape the Ethereum data for analysis and set up a Telegram bot to track the traders on the chain, and time also proved that they were the most profitable wave of people in the DeFi summer at that time.

Later, I invested my entire monthly salary in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but they almost bankrupted me, so I realized that maybe there was an opportunity only in the crypto-native field. Then around January-February 2021, I found some particularly useful NFT Discords, and I used my on-chain data skills to catch a lot of Alpha in the market madness of NFT Summer, so I had a great financial performance and a good time in 2021.

But I was still looking for a way to join the industry full-time. Until November 2021, I met a guy in an NFT Discord who worked for a large crypto payment company, and then I joined their company and led the team’s on-chain data analysis work for the next few years until I released the BRC-20 protocol.

Host: Do you remember when you first heard of Ordinals?

Isabel: I can’t remember exactly when, but I saw it in January 2023, but I didn’t do anything with it. It wasn’t until I saw it again in February that I realized it was more than just some experimental thing a small group of people were playing with in their basement.

Early Ordinals collectibles also played an important role in the birth of BRC-20. For example, Bitcoin punks actually first invented "Fair launch" on Bitcoin because we had no way to distribute through smart contracts.

Then the .stas domain was born, which really brought Jason format data to the masses and into the Bitcoin memory pool. I opened my computer at work and found it, and I thought this is really great, we have taken another step forward, the Ordinals protocol is no longer just an art protocol, it can also use Bitcoin as a data availability layer.

The infrastructure is right in front of us, and you can do what you want. So I thought, is there something else we can do? From that moment on, I thought of the Ordinals protocol as a gateway to Bitcoin data availability that is easily accessible to most users regardless of technical ability or background.

Moderator: Before creating the BRC-20 protocol, did you conceive of this protocol with others or go through some community discussions?

Isabel: After seeing .sats domains use JSON format on the chain, I saw a tweet from a blogger named " redphone ". He worked with Delphi Ventures to publish a pseudo-spec, and I think his design will succeed, but it is missing a few key things, but it is still inspiring.

I locked myself in my room for two days and created the BRC-20 protocol, but a lot of the credit