Eth_ions, the Ethereum inscription protocol against Ordinals, has attracted attention, and over 30,000 mints have been minted within a few days of its launch

By Nancy, PANews

In less than half a year, the total number of Bitcoin Ordinals casting inscriptions has exceeded 12 million. With this new trend, the Ethereum inscription protocol Ethions has also become popular in the encryption community, and more than 30,000 Ethions have been minted so far.

Ethions was officially launched on June 17 by music site Genius.com co-founder Tom Lehman, inspired by the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol. The original Ethions were created in 2016, while Tom Lehman developed the search engine and website for the protocol.

As a new way to create and share digital artifacts on Ethereum using transaction call data, for how Ethions works, according to Tom Lehman, any successful Ethereum transaction, if its input data (when interpreted as UTF-8 ) is a valid data URI (Uniform Resource Locator), and the data URI is unique, an Ethion will be created. Duplicate content will be ignored, and all valid MIME (media types) are supported; for a URI to remain unique, it must be satisfied that there is no Ethion with the same content in the previous block or earlier transactions in the same block; any The input data is a valid Ethion transaction hash, and the transaction sender is the Ethion creator, which is a valid Ethion transfer.

Ethions can write non-financial and arbitrary data to the Ethereum blockchain, and users can burn any type of file as long as the file size does not exceed 96KB. However, currently the Ethions protocol only allows users to create NFTs in the form of pictures, but this will change in the future. According to community members, Tom Lehman intends to add token index content to the Ethions protocol.

And these burnings use Ethereum "call data (Calldata)", that is, the data inside the smart contract, which is "cheaper" and "decentralized" than the minting method using pure smart contracts. At the same time, the Ethions protocol guarantees the uniqueness of all valid content, that is to say, it is theoretically impossible to create duplicate text inscriptions. Users can view all Ethions or browse by address through a website called ethions.com launched by Tom Lehman.

Ethereum Punks is Tom Lehman's first project based on the Ethions protocol. A total of 10,000 Punks were minted within a few hours. According to OpenSea data, the total turnover of Ethions has exceeded 200 ETH.

The crypto community has received mixed reviews for this innovative experiment. “Similar to Ordinals, what’s exciting to me about Ethions for me is that developers are using blockchain technology again, and it’s this kind of experimentation that drives innovation and adoption. This is the first time the technology has been around for years. It has gained widespread attention.” NFT KOL Adam McBride said.

However, crypto KOL Chainleft believes that it is a bit strange for the Ethions protocol to be marketed under the banner of innovation because the technology has existed for many years. Back in 2016, people have been calling data to store custom data/art, the more popular examples are Deafbeef, 0xmon and Eulerbeats, they mainly do this by pushing the boundaries of tools/technologies at the time, which is not storage Ideal way for artwork. While access is possible, it is not assigned to tokens, which is why Ethions tries to solve this problem through off-chain consensus (fairness). In addition, state data provides more comprehensive functions, such as runtime dynamics or artistic programmability. Comparing Inions with Ethions, the former is much less likely to be pruned and has more storage nodes, while the latter can be called by ETH native contracts, while Inions cannot. Of course, neither of them can execute runtime functions.

In short, the innovative narrative of Bitcoin Ordinals has been verified for half a year from its controversial appearance to its current hotness, and it still takes time to verify whether Ethions can open the door to more innovators, and the community is the key to success .