Are Ethscriptions the equivalent of Bitcoin Ordinals?

A new term started to be talked about in the crypto community: Ethscriptions. Indeed, Tom Lehman presented this protocol allowing data to be written on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain without the smart contracts used for the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFT):

In a way, it is reminiscent of the Ordinals protocol, although the operation is actually quite different. On Bitcoin (BTC), satoshis must be used to secure protocol data, whereas Ethscription does not involve “blocking” ETH.

The illustration below shows how this data can be recovered. Indeed, we see, for example, the address cryptoxiao.eth sent a transaction of 0 ETH to itself, with a message to be converted into UTF-8 from the “ View Inpout As ” menu on a blockchain explorer like Etherescan:

Example of ETHscription listing on Ethereum

For this specific registration, it will then be a question of copying and pasting this content into a search engine to view the stored image.

In reality, Ethscription, therefore rather, provides a user interface for a feature that already existed on Ethereum, and which is already used by part of the community: the possibility of sending messages on-chain.

Thus, the project site allows for facilitating the process for the inscription of images up to 96KB for the moment.

Creating an Ethscription

For the moment, it must be recognized that this process is very limited in its possibilities. Indeed, the size of the information that can be shared makes Ethscription much less flexible than NFTs on Ethereum.

Nevertheless, these registrations have the advantage of being fully decentralized, where the content of an NFT is not always stored on-chain, for example.

To transfer a registration, you must then indicate the hash of the transaction that created it in the hexadecimal data field. On MetaMask, for example, you have to activate “ Show Hex data ” in the advanced settings:

Transferring an Ethscription

This manipulation will update the new owner on Ethscription. However, it is important to point out that these registrations are fundamentally different from NFTs and any other cryptocurrency, as it does not use any token standard. Thus, it is only about data transfer.

However, the project generated enthusiasm, and within 18 hours of the launch, 30,000 registrations had already been made on Saturday:

It is still too early to predict the fate of this blockchain application case, but it will be interesting to follow the possible developments that may be carried out around it.