Inscription Protocol Overview: Principles, Implementation, and Security Considerations

As mainstream trading platforms successively launch inscription markets that support various inscription protocols, the entire market's attention to inscriptions continues to rise. However, due to the complexity and novelty of inscription protocols themselves, various security issues have frequently occurred, posing threats not only to the security of user assets but also negatively impacting the healthy development of the inscription ecosystem.

This article will sort out mainstream inscription protocols to help users understand the uses, implementation methods, and how to protect inscription assets.

Inscription Introduction

Inscriptions on the blockchain refer to the use of the characteristics of blockchain to record information with specific meanings on the blockchain. Once recorded, this information will be permanently stored and difficult to tamper with. The types of information that can be recorded are diverse, including simple text, complex code, images, etc. In this way, we can use a standard set to realize the functions of digital assets.

Inscription Status

Since the emergence of BRC-20 and other Bitcoin public chain inscriptions, the inscription ecosystem has developed rapidly. Almost every day, new inscription protocols and projects are emerging. Major public chains are joining the inscription ecosystem, such as the Ethscription protocol on the ETH chain, the ARC-20 protocol on the BTC chain, the BSC-20 protocol on the BSC chain, and the PRC-20 protocol on the Polygon chain. These protocols are all created to publish inscriptions on their respective public chains.

Inscription Explanation

1. BRC-20

The BRC-20 protocol is based on the Bitcoin UTXO model and the Ordinals protocol. The UTXO model records transaction events rather than the final state; calculating the amount of coins a user holds requires summing all UTXOs of their address. The Ordinals protocol assigns a unique number to each satoshi and supports writing text, images, etc. into satoshis.

BRC-20 writes uniformly formatted JSON text data into satoshis through the Ordinals protocol, serving as the ledger for BRC-20 tokens. It mainly includes three standard operations: deploy(, mint), and transfer(. The transfer operation achieves balance changes by sending the inscription to the target address.

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) 2. ARC-20

ARC-20 is also an inscription protocol on the Bitcoin public chain, implemented by writing standard data in UTXO. The difference is that ARC-20 uses the amount of satoshis in the UTXO to represent the number of tokens, with the rule being 1 satoshi = 1 ARC-20 token.

ARC-20 is also divided into three steps: deployment, minting, and transfer. During the minting process, users fill in the token name into the UTXO, and the amount of satoshis in that UTXO is the minting quantity. During the transfer, the UTXO holding the token is directly transferred to another address without the need to fill in additional data.

3. Inscription

Ethscription is a protocol for creating and sharing data on Ethereum. It utilizes the calldata data blocks of Ethereum transactions to add standard data during regular ETH transfers, giving them specific meanings.

When creating an Ethscription, the content ( needs to be converted into a Base64 encoded URI, as shown in the image ), and then converted into a hexadecimal string to be filled in calldata. When transferring an Ethscription, the transaction hash that created the Ethscription needs to be filled in calldata.

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) 4. Inscription of EVM blockchain

EVM blockchains such as BSC, Ethereum, and Polygon use a similar method to store fixed-format data using calldata. Taking BSC as an example, the inscription format is :data:,{"p":"","op":"","tick":"","amt":""}. Here, p represents the protocol name, op represents the operation, tick represents the token name, and amt represents the token amount.

When transferring tokens, you need to send a regular transfer to the receiving address and fill in the transaction hash that created the token in the calldata. There may be slight differences between different EVM chains or protocols, but the principles are similar.

Summary

This article discusses the implementation principles of inscriptions on multiple chains. These inscriptions utilize the characteristics of public chain systems to store offline information on the blockchain according to specified standards, and are displayed through offline servers. The introduced inscription protocol does not use smart contracts, which can reduce user transaction fees. However, users need to fully understand the implementation method of the inscription protocol to avoid operational errors that could lead to asset losses.

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