Ethscriptions: Why ordinals now also exist on Ethereum
An adapted version of the Bitcoin Ordinals is launched on Ethereum under the name Ethscriptions. The developer of the project believes that it can improve the NFT niche in this way. The user community shows great interest.
Ethscriptions: Inscriptions are coming to Ethereum
Earlier this year, developer Casey Rodarmor released his Ordinals protocol, which enables native NFTs on Bitcoin . The invention quickly becomes a resounding success. A copy of the idea now also exists on Ethereum . On the second largest blockchain, the project is called Ethscriptions .
The name is based on the Bitcoin NFTs, which Rodarmor called “Inscriptions” instead of “non-fungible tokens”. The protocol is a special feature on the Bitcoin blockchain, since Bitcoin does not allow complex smart contracts like those known from Ethereum.
Several projects established their own layers to enable NFTs on Bitcoin. However, Rodarmor is the first to manage to make the NFTs natively on the mainnet. Although digital certificates have existed on Ethereum for years, Tom Lehman saw room for improvement.
Lehman, who can be found on Twitter under his alias Middlemarch, is no stranger. He is co-founder and former CEO of the music platform Genius and founded Ethscriptions.
He rates his project as a complete success. Just 18 hours after the project started on June 17, 2023, 30,000 ethscriptions had already been created.
“The launch was a great success! Thank you for recognizing the enormous potential!” Writes Lehman on Twitter. Four days later, users had already created more than 155,000 of the so-called registrations.
Why ordinals now exist on Ethereum
But why does an equivalent of the ordinals even exist on Ethereum, although NFTs on the blockchain have long been possible thanks to smart contracts? Inventor Lehman believes that this will enable better decentralization of the digital certificates. In addition, lower fees may apply.
The functionality is very similar to the Bitcoin Ordinals . Calldata is used to store data directly on the blockchain. This is the information that is stored in a smart contract to define it.
The storage space that an ethscription can access is correspondingly small – just 96 kilobytes. Compared to classic Ethereum NFTs, the protocol is said to have some advantages.
“Ethscriptions can be used without having to rely on external parties. While it may be convenient to trust an indexer, as most members of the Ethereum community do with Etherscan, with Ethscriptions it is possible to do it manually.” Explains Lehman on the protocol’s webpage .
Because the NFTs are stored directly on the blockchain, the storage of all the data they contain is also very decentralized and secure.
No permission is required to use Ethscriptions, and no one can prohibit its use. In contrast, NFTs often rely on data stored in specific smart contracts that a person can control.
The fact that there is interest in the new protocol is shown not only by a large number of registrations but also by the quickly sold out Ethereum Punks. These worked on the model of the Bitcoin Punks, which in turn were based on the legendary NFT collection “CryptoPunks”.
The 10,000 individual pieces were created in no time at all. After the success of the ordinals, Bitcoin was followed by the emergence of an entire ecosystem, so that fungible tokens based on the ordinals protocol can now also be created. A similar success on Ethereum is unlikely.
So far, ethscriptions only include images. Inventor Lehman would like to enable the writing of further media files in the future.
