Reversing history? A brief introduction to the inscription Eth_ions on Ethereum

Written by: Pedro Solimano

Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Over the weekend, there was a lot of interest in a new protocol for inscribed images on ethereum, which allows digital objects to be created and shared on ethereum using call data — dubbed Ethions, in an apparent homage to Inions.

Developed by Genius.com co-founder and former CEO Tom Lehman, the program garnered explosive attention when it launched. Nearly 30,000 Ethions were created in less than 18 hours, according to Lehman, who tweeted that the launch was a “huge success.”

How does Ethions work?

• Any successful Ethereum transaction whose input data (when interpreted as UTF-8) is a valid data URI will create an Ethion, provided the data URI is unique. Duplicate content will be ignored. All valid MIME types are supported.
• For the URI to be 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 Ethereum transaction whose input data is a transaction hash of a valid Ethion is a valid Ethion transfer, provided the sender of the transaction is the owner of the Ethion.

Ethions enables non-financial and arbitrary data to be written to the Ethereum blockchain, and users can burn any type of file as long as the file size does not exceed 96 kilobytes. According to its creator, while it currently only allows images - that will change in the future.

These burns make use of so-called Ethereum “calldata,” which refers to data provided in calls to smart contracts. This is cheaper and more decentralized than using contract storage, Lehman said. The protocol “guarantees the uniqueness of all valid Ethions content,” the creator tweeted.

Unlike Ordinals, the Ethereum community is clearly open to this innovation and experimentation.

“For me, the exciting thing about Ethions, like Ordinals, is that developers are using blockchain technology again,” said Adam McBride, a self-proclaimed NFT archaeologist. “It’s this kind of experimentation that drives innovation and adoption.” Like the Ordinal craze, Eths has attracted a lot of user attention, and even led to several outages for Ethions.

The following takes ETHS as an example to briefly introduce the engraving method of Ethions:

• Copy code, data:, {“p”:“erc-20”, “op”:“mint”, “tick”:“eths”, “id”:“any number within 21000”, “amt”: “1000”}, transcode the website into hexadecimal;
• Open the wallet, transfer 0ETH to your own address, and copy and fill in the hexadecimal obtained by transcoding;
• Just confirm the payment.

Similarly, where there is Fomo, there is Fud, and many communities believe that Ethions is “backwards”. Crypto KOL Chainleft also believes that Ethions has nothing innovative. First, while the protocol debuted over the weekend, people have been calling storing custom data/art in data back in 2016, and the technology has been around for years. They did this mostly by pushing the boundaries of the tools/techniques of the time, which wasn’t an ideal way to store art either. While access is possible, it is not assigned to tokens, which is why Ethions tries to solve this problem through off-chain consensus (fairness).

Second, in terms of functionality, state data has more complete functions, such as runtime dynamics or artistic programmability. Compared with Inions (IS), IS is much less likely to be pruned than ES. IS also has more storage nodes than ES, ES can be called by ETH native contracts, but IS cannot, neither can execute runtime functions.

In general, there are different opinions on whether Ethions is a short-lived bubble or an exciting new trend, and the final decision depends on the consensus of the community.

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