Introducing: Ethscriptions!
Bitcoin Ordinals shook up the market, bringing a new way to inscribe metadata into a single Satoshi to effectively allow the Bitcoin blockchain to host NFTs. Now comes Ethscriptions, the same concept of inscribing data into a Wei on Ethereum!
Anyone can create an Ethscription via their website, now. There's an "easy creation tool" available for those who wish to utilize it, but there is a 96kb image file size limit and it will cost your left kidney in gas fees to execute. At the time of this writing, the base fee is only 13 gWei, but the gas limit is set to 684,160 - resulting in approx. $17 to create one using the tool.
Fortunately, there is another way to do it manually (instructions taken directly from ethscriptions.com):
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Convert an image (max size: ~90KB) to a Base 64-encoded data URI (data:image/png;base64,...) using a service like base64-image.de. The Ethscriptions protocol supports all data URIs but images work best.
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Convert the data URI to hex using an online tool like hexhero.
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Send a 0 eth transaction to the person you want to own the Ethscription with the hex data from (2) in the "Hex data" field.
After a few moments it should appear on the page, provided someone hasn’t already Ethscribed the same data. Duplicate content is ignored!
Unfortunately, it still costs the same (or even more) in gas fees to send the transaction with your manually-inputted hex data (my gas limit was over 800k). Conclusion: it is expensive to write data on to a blockchain, even if the availability is processed by a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. This is further evidence why Ethereum is shifting to supporting a "Layer-2" centric network (see EIP4844: Proto-danksharding) where the 4 core functions of Execution, Consensus, Settlement, and Data Availability can be made modular and separated to another layer/network. How that is done, is a topic for another time...
It's interesting to note that "duplicate content is ignored" perhaps implying that a hex written into the blockchain is then indexed and referenced with the entire blockchain copy held by each validator. Perhaps that is why the gas fee is so expensive? I'll get back to you on that one, but if so then it figures that it might be an unnecessary use of resources. It doesn't make sense why that would be the case, as anyone can send a message to another by converting the text into hex data - and messages can't possibly be unique otherwise ignored.
But as it stands, Ethscriptions seem to be unique. So create yours today, before it is taken by someone else... and thanks to the step-by-step instructions provided by Ethscriptions, you don't even need to use their tools and it will show up on the webpage. And while there is no marketplace that has been created specifically to support this yet, my bet is that it won't be long before one comes around :) Show Less
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