Recently, there have been several Inscription metas happening across various chains, causing significant gas spikes and disrupting the normal operation of the chains in the past few days.
However, very few people actually know how it works or what is currently happening on each chain.
Therefore, today I would like to briefly explain the definition and operation of Inscription to all of you.
The Origin of Inscription
Originally, the BTC chain did not support smart contracts, making it impossible to create NFTs or standard tokens.
However, through a project initiated in BTC’s Ordinals, it became possible to record (Inscription) arbitrary files (such as images, text, videos, etc.) of 4MB or less on the smallest unit of Bitcoin, called satoshi. This enabled the storage of various files on-chain.
The Boom of Inscription
People began using Ordinals to create a new standard within the Bitcoin blockchain known as BRC-20 tokens. BRC-20 tokens are a new standard that allows the deploy and transfer of tokens by recording various forms of text on satoshi.
In particular, it gained significant popularity in April this year, it gained significant popularity, and the number of inscriptions started to explode, leading to a surge in network fees as it combined with the security features boasted by the Bitcoin network, generating a considerable number of transactions..
Introduction to Deploying BRC-20
Now that you have a sense of what Inscription is, how about we explore the ways to participate in various Inscription events you’ve been observing from afar and take some time to create them ourselves?
The three essential types of functions that a BRC-20 token should have can be activated by inscribing them on sats(satoshi).
- Deploy
- Mint
- Transfer
Deploy
To deploy a BRC-20 token initially, you inscribe the above JSON format onto specific sats.
- “p”: Indicates whether other systems are aware that this inscription is related to BRC-20.
- “op”: Specifies the type of operation (Deploy, Mint, Transfer).
- “tick”: Specifies the ticker of the BRC-20 token to be deployed (four letters).
- “max”: Represents the total supply of the BRC-20 token.
- “lim”: Indicates the maximum amount users can mint at once when minting this BRC-20 token (optional).
Mint
Mint Function can be used only for already deployed BRC-20 tokens. To mint a token on different sats, you can inscribe the ticker, operation, and quantity of the desired token in the provided JSON format, and the BRC-20 token will be minted.
- “amt”: The quantity of tokens you want to mint (if a limit was set during deployment, you can mint up to the maximum limit).
Transfer
When transferring minted tokens to others, you can create a JSON format on different sats as described above. And then, sending these sats to the desired recipient’s Bitcoin wallet address completes the token transfer.
For a simpler way to create BRC-20 tokens, you can use the Dapp below to perform the same actions.
That’s it! Use Inscription to encode your messages into Bitcoin! 👍
