Inscriptions Frenzy has come to Chia – XCHS

One implementation of inscriptions following the style of Bitcoin BRC-20 tokens has come to Chia from @XCHSCRIPTIONS and supported by the Pawket cross-platform wallet.

The idea is pretty simple: piggyback a digital asset ecosystem on the back of normal XCH transactions by leveraging the memo field. For example, I can create a SLOW token by sending myself 1 mojo with this memo:

{'p':'xchs','op':'deploy','tick':'slow','max':'1000','lim':'10'}

Once deployed, the protocol logs this ticker and will then recognize further “mints” of up to 10 SLOW tokens at a time, up to a maximum supply of 1000 SLOW. This information will show up on https://unimojo.io.

Anyone can now mint this token for themselves by sending 1 mojo to themselves with this memo:

{'p':'xchs','op':'mint','tick':'slow','amt':'10'}

To transfer 5 tokens to someone else, I can send 1 mojo with this memo:

{'p':'xchs','op':'transfer','tick':'slow','amt':'5'}

Important! Transfers are not recognized by the website yet and there’s no current way to check your token balance. The assumption is the indexer will recognize these transfers in the future but it’s not recommended to make any transfers for now until there’s more clarity into how it works.

That’s basically it. The rest of the protocol (figuring out valid memos, determining account balance) is just a matter of parsing through all transactions with a ‘xchs’ protocol memo in sequence to determine the latest state.

This system is like an account model.

In my opinion, there are a couple benefits of this implementation over CATs:

• The extra data is in the memo which is part of the coin spend and is not prunable (unlike segwit data).
• There’s no concept of accidentally spending an inscribed mojo.

But there are a number of potential challenges:

• Social consensus is required to make it a thing.
• Existing wallets might be able to interact via memos but won’t display token balances.
• Wallets with multiple derivation addresses may introduce UX complications.

And a number of items that still need to be addressed:

• Doesn’t work with Offer Files yet
• Protocol rules are not well defined yet nor has the indexer code been open sourced (e.g. what happens when there are two spends in the same block?)
• No acknowledgement yet by existing ecosystem tools like dexie or SpaceScan.

As for my thoughts, I think it will generate a burst of mempool activity from folks minting out all 4 char tickers but it ultimately suffers from “The Cold Start Problem”.

I have no current plans of supporting this on XCH.trade but will keep an eye on it.