What are Ethscriptions? Ordinal-inspired Innovation on Ethereum

Update 7 Jul 2023 • Reading Time 5 Minute

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The emergence of Bitcoin Ordinals in early 2023 brought a new excitement to the world of cryptocurrencies. This protocol allows users to send, receive, and mint NFTs on the Bitcoin network with inscriptions. In response to this innovation, Ethscriptions launched on the Ethereum blockchain on June 17, 2023. Its appearance caused Ethereum’s gas fees to spike due to network congestion. In this article, we’ll discuss about Ethscriptions and how to create them.

Article Summary

📟 Ethscriptions are a new way of creating artifacts or digital assets stored on the Ethereum blockchain using calldata.
🖼️ Tom Lehman introduced ethscriptions on June 17, 2023, on his Twitter. Along with that, he also introduced a project that uses Ethscriptions, Ethereum Punks.
🫔 To list your Ethscriptions on an NFT marketplace like Opensea, you must first “wrap” it into an NFT in Emblem Vault. It is because smart contracts on Ethereum (which support Opensea) currently cannot send Ethscriptions.
📝 Ethscriptions are different from ERC-721, which stores NFTs in smart contracts. Ethscriptions store their digital assets inside Ethereum transactions.

What are Ethscriptions?

ethscriptions works — Source: Ethscriptions

Ethscriptions are a new way of creating artifacts or digital assets stored on the Ethereum blockchain using calldata. Calldata is a collection of data sent along with Ethereum transactions. Ethscriptions are part of the calldata in the form of images and text.

Different from NFTs that use ERC-721, Ethscriptions take a different approach by being stored within Ethereum transactions. Unlike ERC-721 NFTs, which are stored at the smart contract and token level, Ethscriptions are stored at the transaction level.

Tom Lehman introduced Ethscriptions on June 17, 2023, on his Twitter. He said that Ethscriptions allows for more affordable and decentralized contract storage.

The Ethscriptions system, which involves storing unique uniform resource identifiers (URIs) in the calldata of Ethereum transactions, has been in existence for some time. It was initially implemented in 2016 and has been utilized by NFT projects such as Blitmap and 0xmons. However, it gained increased recognition following the introduction of Bitcoin Ordinals, which introduced the concept of inscriptions.

Learn more about What are Ordinals? Get to know Bitcoin NFT Innovation.

The first project using Ethscriptions was Ethereum Punks that introduced along with the launching of Ethscriptions. Cointelegraph mentions that within four days of its launch, there were already 140,000 Ethscriptions.

Ethscriptions are digital assets stored as part of the transaction. That makes it cheaper than ERC-721 but less flexible as it doesn’t support smart contract logic.

How Do Ethscriptions Work?

Ethscriptions work using Ethereum calldata transactions to create digital assets.

In sending a crypto asset, you usually send a transaction with a value (ether) to the recipient. Besides that, you can also send some non-financial and arbitrary data along with the transaction called calldata.

Quoted from sadat.eth, to create your first Ethscription, you can send a transaction of 0 ETH to the recipient with valid URI data as calldata. Then to transfer the Ethscription, you can send a 0 ETH transaction to the new owner with the transaction hash of the valid Ethscription you have as calldata.

For now, Ethscriptions only facilitate digital assets in the form of images, but it is possible for other types of digital assets in the future.

ethscriptions creation and transfer — Sumber: sadat.eth

How to Create Ethscriptions

Visit the ethscriptions.com website.
Connect your crypto wallet.
Click ‘Create Ethscriptions.’
Upload an image with a maximum size of 96KB.
Click ‘Ethscribe!’ to create an Ethscription.
Sign the transaction on the crypto wallet that shows the gas fee information.

How to Transfer Ethscriptions

To transfer an Ethscription, you have to do it manually. Here is the process:

Copy the Ethscription ID on Etherscan or the ethscriptions.com website. It is a combination of letters and numbers like 0xcdb372580242c1c1bbcd2914ddbdb609b33d2e163c6595e164cb4dc6665153
Send a transaction of 0 ETH to the crypto wallet (the new owner), including the Ethscription ID in the “Hex Data” field.
After a few moments, the Ethscription owner can update the website, provided that you were the Ethscription owner when you sent the transfer transaction.

The sender of the transaction is the creator of the Ethscription, while the recipient of the transaction is the initial owner of the Ethscription.

To list your Ethscription on NFT marketplaces such as Opensea, you must first “wrap” it into an NFT. You can use a platform like Emblem Vault to be seen on these marketplaces.

Also read: What is Opensea Pro?

The reason why you need Emblem Vault to list Ethscriptions, is because, currently, smart contracts on Ethereum (which support Opensea) cannot send Ethscriptions.

Here is a video tutorial explaining the steps in creating and transferring Ethscriptions by @adamamcbride.

Pros and Cons of Ethscriptions

Ethscriptions offers the advantage of cost-effective creation of digital assets, leveraging the capabilities of Ethereum’s blockchain technology while also benefiting from its decentralized nature.

Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that Ethscriptions currently have limitations in terms of functionality and flexibility. This is primarily due to the lack of support for smart contract logic within the Ethscriptions system.

In addition, it is also important to note that Ethscriptions also do not guarantee optimal storage. Updates such as Ethereum’s upcoming The Purge, through the EIP-4444 initiative, may result in the pruning of calldata transactions impacting asset storage.

Conclusion

Ethscriptions is an innovative step in bringing a decentralized and low-cost alternative to creating and transferring digital assets. Although it still has some limitations, the potential for development and improvement on Ethscriptions remains interesting.

Buy Crypto Assets on Pintu

After knowing what Ethscriptions is, you can start investing by buying crypto assets such as ETH without worrying about fraud on Pintu. Pintu diligently evaluates all its crypto assets, highlighting the significance of being cautious.

Pintu is also compatible with popular wallets such as Metamask to facilitate your transactions. Download Pintu app on Play Store and App Store! Your security is guaranteed because Pintu is regulated and supervised by Bappebti and Kominfo.

Aside from buying and trading crypto assets, you can expand your knowledge about cryptocurrencies through various Pintu Academy articles. All Pintu Academy articles are updated weekly for knowledge and educational purposes, not as financial advice.