Quickly understand recursive inscriptions: the Lego blocks of ordinals

Author: veDAO Research Institute

In the recent ongoing bearish market sentiment, the Bitcoin protocol Ordinals has brought a noteworthy update— the launch of Recursive inscriptions. It allows the use of special syntax to reference other inscriptions, making the creation of inscriptions smaller in size and lower in cost. So what exactly are Recursive inscriptions? This article will take you through the most noteworthy innovations of Recursive inscriptions.

What are Ordinals Recursive Inscriptions

On June 12, news broke that Raph, the new chief maintainer of the Bitcoin protocol Ordinals, merged the "Recursive inscriptions #2167" proposed by Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor into the Ordinals code on GitHub. Subsequently, one of the anonymous developers of Ordinals, Leonidas.og, introduced and explained the concept known as "Recursive inscriptions" in a tweet.

Recursive inscriptions refer to a method of engraving on the blockchain that breaks the awkward situation where each inscription is independent and unassociated in previous engraving methods. Through its self-referential nature, it opens up the possibility of free combinations. In short, a Recursive inscription is an inscription that requests the content of other inscriptions.

Specific Content and Innovations of Recursive Inscriptions

According to developer Leonidas.og's interpretation, inscriptions can now use the special "/-/content/:inscription_id" syntax to request the content of other inscriptions, which directly allows users to create inscriptions on the Bitcoin chain with less capacity, thus incurring lower transaction fees.

• Past: To create an inscription for a PFP collection, users needed to upload images, which they would then download on-chain. As the quality of images improved, becoming more detailed and high-definition, the corresponding image memory and space occupied also increased, leading to higher costs.

• Present: The special ID syntax used for Recursive inscriptions essentially employs text codes to locate images. Creating PFP collection inscriptions can now be done by uploading the corresponding features of the images, including patterns (monkeys), colors (green background), actions (raising hands), and other elements. Then, the found corresponding elements that already exist on-chain can be combined and stitched together without the need to upload and download images.

• Direct Advantage: This method of creating inscriptions is in the form of calling text codes, so the size is very small, which not only greatly reduces costs but also allows the size of inscriptions to exceed the Bitcoin block size limit of 4MB.

• Expansion Potential: The high flexibility, combinability, and low-cost advantages of Recursive inscriptions bring infinite new possibilities, allowing complex content such as images, videos, and 3D games to be engraved on-chain (the inscription types have also added "JS" and "CSS" types).

• OnChainMonkey: This team has already engraved two completely on-chain npm packages on the Bitcoin chain and then used recursion to call these packages from the upcoming Dimensions collection inscriptions, creating beautiful 3D artworks at less than 1 KB in size. OnChainMonkey will release the Recursive inscriptions project OCM Dimensions on June 15, and subsequently, the resources of these packages will be public resources, like joining a material library, allowing others to use Recursive inscriptions to reference them.

• Ord.io: The Bitcoin inscription exploration and discovery platform Ord.io officially supported the creation and display of Recursive inscriptions on June 12. The official Twitter account even expressed surprise that someone had created a dynamic art inscription using recursion with only 466 bytes.

The Infinite Possibilities of the Bitcoin Chain

Due to the characteristics of Recursive inscriptions, establishing an internal internet becomes possible. Here, not only can each file request data from other files on the Bitcoin chain, but many repositories will also be able to access each other, which means that more valuable content can be uploaded to the Bitcoin chain.

Founder Casey Rodarmor has answered community members' questions, stating that new inscription types related to web construction, such as "JavaScript" and "CSS," have been added. This means that we will soon see dynamic websites existing on a decentralized network that will never disappear;

There are even more possibilities:

• Secondary Creation of Inscriptions: The combinability and potentially future separability of Recursive inscriptions, along with an increasingly rich public material resource, will undoubtedly bring more creative stimulation to inscription creation.

• Decentralized GitHub: Some in the community believe that the combinability and potential future separability can also be utilized to move code data from GitHub onto the Bitcoin chain, achieving complete decentralization.

• NFT Combination Fragmentation: This is undoubtedly the most anticipated content. If Recursive domains achieve separable inscriptions, NFTs will also realize free combination and disassembly. This technology can also be envisioned for applications beyond the Bitcoin chain, innovating more NFT gameplay.

Conclusion

Currently, the Recursive inscriptions code has just been merged for a few days, and the emergence of Recursive inscriptions marks a further enhancement of the programmability of the Ordinals protocol at the application level, undoubtedly a significant moment on the Bitcoin chain. The richness of content, reduction of costs, and infinite possibilities for future combinations all make us immensely excited about the application and expansion of Recursive inscriptions. However, it is essential to remind that new things inevitably come with uncertainties and unknown risks; bugs in the code may also occur. While being optimistic about the attempts, please manage risks carefully and invest cautiously.