Written by: Pedro Solimano

Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

A new protocol for inscribing images on Ethereum generated a lot of interest over the weekend, allowing digital objects to be created and shared on Ethereum using invocation data — called Ethscriptions, an apparent nod to Inscriptions.

Developed by Tom Lehman, co-founder and former CEO of Genius.com, the project has exploded in popularity since its launch, with nearly 30,000 Ethscriptions created in less than 18 hours, according to Lehman, who tweeted that the launch was a “huge success.”

How do Ethscriptions work? Any successful Ethereum transaction whose input data (when interpreted as UTF-8) is a valid data URI will create an Ethscription, provided that the data URI is unique. Duplicates are ignored. All valid MIME types are supported. For a URI to be unique, there must not be any Ethscription with the same content in the previous block or in an earlier transaction in the same block. Any Ethereum transaction whose input data is the transaction hash of a valid Ethscription is a valid Ethscription transfer, provided that the transaction sender is the owner of the Ethscription.

Ethscriptions enables non-financial and arbitrary data to be written to the Ethereum blockchain, and users can burn any type of file as long as the file size does not exceed 96 kilobytes. Although it currently only allows pictures - according to its creators - this will change in the future.

These burns make use of what’s known as Ethereum “calldata,” which refers to the data provided in a call to a smart contract. Lehman said this is cheaper and more decentralized than using contract storage. The protocol “guarantees uniqueness of the contents of all valid Ethscriptions,” the creator wrote on Twitter.

Unlike Ordinals, the Ethereum community is clearly open to innovation and experimentation.

“For me, what’s exciting about Ethscriptions, like Ordinals, is that developers are using blockchain technology again,” said Adam McBride, a self-proclaimed NFT archaeologist. “It’s this kind of experimentation that drives innovation and adoption.” Like the craze for Ordinals, Eths has attracted a lot of attention from users, even causing Ethscriptions to experience several downtimes.

Taking ETHS as an example, the following briefly introduces the engraving method of Ethscriptions:

Copy the code, data:, {"p":"erc-20", "op":"mint", "tick":"eths", "id":"any number within 21000", "amt":"1000"}, and convert it to hexadecimal on the transcoding website; Open the wallet, transfer 0ETH to your own address, and copy and fill in the hexadecimal obtained by transcoding; Confirm the payment.

Similarly, there is Fomo and there is Fud, and many communities think that Ethscriptions is "going backwards". Crypto KOL Chainleft also believes that Ethscriptions is not innovative. First of all, although the protocol debuted over the weekend, as early as 2016, people have been calling for storing custom data/art in data, and this technology has been around for years. They mainly did this by breaking the boundaries of the tools/technology at the time, which was not an ideal way to store artworks. Although access can be made, it is not assigned to tokens, which is why Ethscriptions attempts to solve this problem through off-chain consensus (fairness).

Secondly, in terms of functionality, state data has more complete functions, such as runtime dynamism or artistic programmability. Compared with Inscriptions (IS), IS is much less likely to be pruned than ES. IS also has more storage nodes than ES. ES can be called by ETH native contracts, while IS cannot. Neither can execute runtime functions.

Overall, there are different opinions on whether Ethscriptions are a short-lived bubble or an exciting new trend, and the final decision will depend on the consensus of the community.

References:

https://twitter.com/ChainLeftist/status/1670071115064942599

https://twitter.com/dumbnamenumbers/status/1669822912579223552