drc-20 coins

DRC-20

A JSON token standard inscribed on Dogecoin, cloned from BRC-20, enforced by indexers.

Updated 2026-09-114 min readdrc-20 · tokens

Pattern
BRC-20
Host
Doginals inscriptions
Operations
deploy, mint, transfer
First ticker (Apezord lineage)
DOGI, 11 Mar 2023
Ticker length
4 characters in the canonical examples
Open leather ledger with a brass Shiba paperweight

DRC-20 is an experimental fungible-token metaprotocol for Dogecoin. A deploy inscription announces a ticker, a max supply, and usually a mint limit. Mint inscriptions create balance for the minter, up to those caps. Transfer inscriptions move balance in two steps. None of this is Dogecoin script. It is a state machine in indexer software that watches for JSON with "p": "drc-20".

The three operations

Deploy is a birth certificate. It does not credit anyone. It tells later mints the rules: tick, max, optional lim (per-inscription mint cap), optional dec (decimals, default 18 in the published tables).

Deploy (canonical teaching example uses WOOF; history used DOGI)
{ "p": "drc-20", "op": "deploy", "tick": "dogi", "max": "21000000", "lim": "1000" }

Mint credits the owner of the mint inscription, if the ticker exists, supply remains, and amt does not exceed lim. Using an inscription service can credit the service first — the indexer is literal about who held the mint.

Mint
{ "p": "drc-20", "op": "mint", "tick": "dogi", "amt": "1000" }

Transfer is a two-part trick copied from BRC-20. First inscribe a transfer intent to your own address. Then send that inscription. The first send of a valid transfer inscription is the one that moves the balance. A second send of the same object is, in the usual state machines, a souvenir.

Transfer
{ "p": "drc-20", "op": "transfer", "tick": "dogi", "amt": "100" }

Not a contract

There is no approve(), no allowance, no on-chain totalSupply you can query from Core RPC. Content types accepted for DRC-20 events are typically text/plain and application/json. A JPEG of the same JSON is, in a strict indexer, decoration. First-seen deploy wins inside a given indexer. A second deploy of the same tick is invalid there even if another indexer never saw the first.

Questions

Is DRC-20 on Dogecoin Core?

No. Core will confirm the transaction as money. Token balances live in indexer databases.

Why do some sites show different DOGI supplies?

They are counting different first-seen windows. See the DOGI article and the indexer wars salon thread.

Sources

Primary texts for this chapter. The full index lives on Doginals sources.

trade the notebook

Pulse sees the market. Swap moves it. Wallet signs it.

DRC-20 is not a smart contract. Doge Soft treats the coins as L1 objects anyway — live prices, an AMM, and commit-reveal sends from a phone that keeps the keys.

Open Pulse