Deploy, mint, transfer

Protocol

How DRC-20 Coins use plain-text inscriptions and commit-reveal to deploy, mint and transfer on Dogecoin L1.

DRC-20 is a plain-text inscription standard for fungible coins on Dogecoin L1 — the same idea as BRC-20 on Bitcoin, adapted to Dogecoin's UTXO set and fee economics. There's no smart contract: a coin's entire existence is a sequence of inscriptions that an indexer replays to compute balances.

Three operations

deploy

Create the coin

Declares a tick, max supply and per-mint limit. One valid deploy per tick, first inscribed wins.

mint

Issue supply

Anyone can inscribe a mint up to the per-mint limit, until the max supply is exhausted.

transfer

Move a balance

A two-step inscribe-then-send: inscribing a transfer earmarks an amount, sending the inscription moves it.

{
  "p": "drc-20",
  "op": "deploy",
  "tick": "woof",
  "max": "21000000",
  "lim": "1000"
}

Commit and reveal

Inscriptions don't fit inside a standard output script, so DRC-20 (like Doginals) uses a two-transaction pattern:

Commit — a P2SH output is funded whose redeem script is <pubkey> OP_CHECKSIGVERIFY OP_DROP×N OP_TRUE, where the dropped data chunks carry the inscription envelope.
Reveal — a transaction spends that P2SH output. The envelope lives in the outer scriptSig of this reveal transaction (not inside the redeem script itself), which is what an indexer actually decodes.

A transfer inscription's reveal output is itself the spendable unit — whoever's address controls that output controls the earmarked balance until it's sent on.

The indexer decides what counts

DRC-20 has no on-chain validation — any malformed, out-of-order, or over-limit inscription is simply ignored by a correct indexer rather than rejected by the network. That means balances are only as good as the indexer computing them. Doge Soft's indexer is the source every other service (wallet, Explorer, Swap) reads from, so they all agree with each other by construction.

ℹ️

Building your own DRC-20 tooling? You almost never need to parse envelopes yourself — the Explorer API already exposes balances, UTXOs and transfer inscriptions per address.

Next: what actually happens, step by step, when a wallet sends DRC-20 Coins.