Since the launch of the Bitcoin on-chain protocol Ordinals, and then the brc20 concept proposed by developer domo, micro-innovations based on the Ordinals protocol have emerged one after another, such as orc20, which intends to make brc20 more flexible, and GBRC721, which optimizes block space. However, regardless of whether these protocols are pseudo-demands and the popularity of attention or hype, they are all optimizing existing protocols, that is, they have been discussing how to make a carriage run faster, rather than trying to invent a car.

But the "recursive inscription" recently proposed by Casey Rodarmor, the creator of the Bitcoin protocol Ordinals, surprised the community and also gave the community more ideas. On June 12, Raph, the new chief maintainer of the Bitcoin protocol Ordinals, merged the "recursive inscription" 2167 update into the Ordinals code on Github. This inscription can use the special "/-/content/:inscription_id" syntax to request the content of other inscriptions. This simple change unlocks many powerful use cases.

The era of inscription 2.0 may have arrived

According to the developer Leonidas.og, it is very expensive to engrave 10,000 JPEG files for a PFP collection alone, but engraving 200 features from the collection and then making 10,000 engravings, each of which uses a small amount of code to request features and programmatically render the image, allows artwork to be stored on the chain in a more efficient way.

In addition, in the previous inscription method, each inscription was independent and there was no connection between the inscriptions. However, this situation will change with the introduction of recursive inscriptions. It is possible to completely inscribe many code packages on the Bitcoin chain. Because the code (in text form) is called, the size is very small, which can break the 4MB limit of the Bitcoin block size and enable complex 3D video games to be completely chained to Bitcoin.

This also makes the community believe that smart contracts similar to ERC20 may be able to run on the Bitcoin chain, making scalability and interoperability on the Bitcoin chain possible.

Moreover, the reason why many people are willing to pay for NFTs on the Bitcoin chain is not only the hype, but also the story of permanent storage on the chain. Therefore, if recursive inscriptions make it possible for the metaverse covering sub-sectors such as games and DeFi to operate on the Bitcoin chain, its story will be more sexy than on other chains.

Perhaps, recursive inscriptions will lead the transformation of inscriptions on the Bitcoin chain, allowing Bitcoin inscriptions to move from the previous 1.0 era to the inscription 2.0 era.

After the birth of recursive inscriptions, communities or individuals have built multiple projects based on its grammar. Currently, many of them have been collected and indexed on the trading platform MagicEden. Among them, Recursive Frog has the strongest consensus, its transaction volume is also significant, and its official gameplay is diverse.

Summarize

The emergence of recursive inscriptions has opened up the shackles of previous non-interoperability, non-programmability, and poor scalability, bringing more possibilities and imagination to the Bitcoin chain. For example, NFTs can be combined with each other, making it possible to play small games on the chain; or disassembling inscriptions, similar to fragmentation, to generate more calls. Some community members also think of the possibility of realizing a decentralized website.

From the perspective of the protocol, the future prospects are limitless, and there are enough grand narratives waiting for developers and users to build and use. However, the front end is still in a highly controlled situation, because whether an inscription or an NFT series can be collected and indexed by the platform determines its development speed and the consensus of being preached. As mentioned above, Recursive Punks cannot be identified by new users for a while because of the index.

But these problems will be gradually solved as the ecosystem develops. We cannot stop or sit back and watch because of some details or difficulties. The era of Bitcoin Inscription 2.0 may be led by recursive inscriptions, which will bring opportunities and risks. Please participate in this experiment, explore, discover and study, and participate under the premise of controlling risks.