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Ordinals

Ordinals are a system for tracking and transferring satoshis, Bitcoin's smallest units and attaching data to satoshis. When such attachment of data to satoshi happens an inscription is created. Inscription content is entirely on-chain, stored in taproot script-path spend scripts forever. These scripts receive witness discounts, making inscription content storage relatively economical.

How to create an inscription​

Inscriptions are created using taproot script. That means you have to use a P2TR type of address to be able to create the inscription.

Wallets that support taproot addresses​

Inscribing data​

There are several ways to create inscriptions, the following two are advised:

note

Even though the inscribing process requires only 1 satoshi to which data are inscribed, there are associated fees to store the data based on inscription size and padding - an amount of satoshis included in the UTXO to pay for future inscriptions transfers.

Using the SDK​

If you're developing an app with Javascript or Typescript you can use the BOB SDK to create the commit and reveal transactions required to inscribe data to an ordinal. Refer to the inscribeText function and provide a custom RemoteSigner implementation for your wallet. The test in sdk/test/ordinals.test.ts provides an example implementation using bitcoinjs-lib and tiny-secp256k1.

How to transfer inscription​

To transfer the inscription, the satoshi to which the data were inscribed has to be transferred. To do that, simply select the inscription in your wallet and send it to the recipient's address.

tip

Make sure that the recipient of the transfer provided a valid P2TR address.

How to explore ordinal data​

Even though inscription data are stored on the blockchain, they are not directly accessible by calling a Bitcoin node. To be able to work with inscriptions, an ordinals indexer has to be run. There is a main open-source indexer implementation which contains an ordinals explorer web interface and an API deployed at ordinals.com.

BOB provides a free public API for accessing Ordinals data on both Bitcoin mainnet and testnet. We provide OpenAPI documentation for both APIs at https://ord-mainnet.gobob.xyz/docs and https://ord-testnet.gobob.xyz/docs respectively. As of October 2023 the API is in beta and is subject to change. We will do our best to keep the API stable and backwards compatible. If you have any questions or suggestions, please join our Discord server at https://discord.com/invite/interlay and let us know.