Ethscriptions Protocol Expands NFT Creation Options

With the introduction of a new protocol, Ethereum users now have a second option for creating nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and other digital assets on the blockchain.

The June 17 launch of the “Ethscriptions” protocol refers to the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol, where assets are known as “inscriptions.”

Ethscriptions was created by Tom Lehman, the co-founder of the music website Genius.com, who employs the alias Middlemarch on Twitter.

Lehman stated in a series of tweets on June 17 that the project was a “huge success” and that nearly 30,000 Ethscriptions had been created within 18 hours of the protocol going live.

According to Lehman, Ethscriptions assets use Ethereum “calldata”—the data contained within a smart contract — to enable a “cheaper” and “more decentralized” minting process than conventional smart contract-based methods.

Lehman says that in the future, users will be able to submit additional file types. Currently, users are restricted to uploading only images.

Now, users can “ethscribe” any image if it is smaller than 96 kilobytes.

The community’s response to “Ethereum Punks,” Lehman’s debut initiative on the Ethscriptions protocol, was highly favorable, with all 10,000 assets being claimed almost immediately.

Lehman added that the initiative’s launch generated so much user activity that the API interface on the official Ethscriptions website crashed temporarily.

Due to the pre-existing infrastructure on the Ethereum network that enables the creation of NFTs and other digital assets, it is uncertain whether Ethscriptions will achieve the same level of popularity as Bitcoin Ordinals.

In less than six months, the number of Ordinals engraved on Bitcoin rose from zero to ten million.

Users embracing the novelty of being able to mint assets, which later included wholly new tokens via the BRC-20 token standard, on the Bitcoin network drove a significant portion of the enormous increase in activity.