SRC-20 Goes Native: Independence from Counterparty
On June 6, 2023, at block 793,068, SRC-20 encoded directly on Bitcoin for the first time. It's a sovereignty milestone: the token standard stopped depending on another protocol and started writing itself straight onto the base chain.
The Counterparty starting point
Early SRC-20 transactions rode on Counterparty, a metaprotocol that had lived on Bitcoin since 2014. Counterparty gave the standard a working encoding path in its earliest days, and that let the community move fast.
But relying on another protocol means inheriting its assumptions and its constraints. For a standard built around permanence and self-sufficiency, that dependency was a loose end.
Native encoding at block 793,068
Block 793,068 is where SRC-20 got its own native Bitcoin encoding. From there, a deploy, mint, or transfer could be written directly on Bitcoin without routing through Counterparty at all. The token data lands in the same UTXO-based storage that gives every stamp its permanence.
The cutoff at block 796,000
Native encoding alone wasn't the whole story. The protocol also drew a hard line. At block 796,000, on June 26, 2023, Counterparty-based SRC-20 became invalid. After that height, the consensus rule is clear: SRC-20 is native Bitcoin encoding, full stop.
That cutoff is what turned a new capability into a real standard. There's no ambiguity about which transactions count. Indexers, wallets, and anyone validating the chain follow the same rule, anchored to a specific block.
Why sovereignty matters here
Independence from Counterparty means SRC-20 stands on Bitcoin alone. No second protocol to trust, no external rule set to track. The permanence guarantee that started with the first stamp now covers fungible tokens end to end, decided entirely by Bitcoin consensus.
Read the encoding spec in the Bitcoin Stamps Whitepaper, and explore the ecosystem at stampchain.io.