Super Meta-Protocols: Everything you need to know

Super Meta-Protocols: Everything you need to know

by Bob Bodily

Super Meta-Protocols: Upgrading Meta-Protocols for the Future

Meta-protocols on Bitcoin are a perfect blend of full Bitcoin data availability and off-chain indexing that enable all kinds of new interesting functionality on Bitcoin (NFTs, tokens, swaps, DEXs, staking, etc).

Essentially anything you can do with a smart contract, you can do with a meta-protocol.

Meta-protocols include Ordinals, BRC-20, TAP, PIPE, Runestone, SNS, ONS, Bitmap, etc.

But meta-protocols are not perfect. Their biggest weaknesses:

1. Transaction overhead: Every meta-protocol transaction is a separate Bitcoin transaction.

2. Inefficient encoding: Meta-protocols use inefficient JSON encoding.

3. Centralized indexers: Meta-protocols rely on trusted centralized indexers.

Super Meta-Protocols solve these problems by:

1. Batching transactions

Instead of submitting your own transactions directly to Bitcoin, Super Meta-Protocols allow you to submit your transaction directly through a batching system. With a decentralized batching system you don’t add any additional trust assumptions and you get 10x more throughput and 10x cost reduction for meta-protocol transactions.

2. Providing efficient encoding

Instead of JSON, we should use more efficient encodings for meta-protocols. We could get an additional 2x more throughput and 2x cost reduction (on top of the batching gains) if we used a more efficient encoding for meta-protocols.

3. Enabling easy verification

Verifying meta-protocol state is currently VERY hard. If the batching system were to actually put meta-protocol state merkle roots + easy-to-verify data on Bitcoin with the batched transactions, then you get a scenario where you can quickly and easily verify the state yourself without having to run an indexer at all!

Summary

Super Meta-Protocols solve the critical weaknesses of existing meta-protocols and give us 20x more throughput, 20x cheaper transactions, and 1000x easier verification.

Additional Resources:

1. My deep dive on X: https://x.com/BobBodily/status/1725589652537778595?s=20