This past weekend, the popularity of inscriptions only increased.
The first inscription project CIAS was also launched on the modular blockchain Celestia, but the community found that the code of the CIAS project side may have plagiarized the COSS inscription code. After CIAS officially launched mint, it received more than 1 million visits from more than 120,000 people within one hour, and more than 50% of the transactions on the Celestia chain were related to CIAS. Later, its team issued a document stating that RPC had encountered a failure and announced the suspension of mint, saying Restoration times will be notified 12 hours in advance.
This sudden suspension of minting was called unplugging the network cable by the community, but it did not reduce the markets attention to CIAS. Someone posted a video of a scientist hitting CIAS on the community. Mustafa, the founder of Celestia, forwarded the video saying that this was a problem they wanted to solve.
We don’t know whether CIAS is the inscription project officially launched by Celestia, but it can be seen from CIAS that various public chains cannot stand still when faced with inscriptions.
Stress Test Inscription Edition
In fact, with the development of inscriptions, it is no longer just about Bitcoin. It can even be said that the inscriptions on different chains have become a stress test for the chain.
After the introduction of the Tonado protocol on December 8 and a surge in related activity, the TON network experienced long delays in transaction processing. According to monitoring data from the blockchain status monitoring robot dTON, the inscription called TON 20 launched by the Tonano team starting on December 5 resulted in more than 2 million transactions in just half an hour, and network usage increased 61 times; This sudden spike in traffic was also accompanied by severe congestion on the TON network, with severe delays in verification even though network validators were still generating blocks.
As of the afternoon of December 7, more than 2.5 million transactions were waiting to be processed, and the transaction processing speed of the TON blockchain dropped to less than 1 transaction per second. This situation forced the TON cryptocurrency wallet Wallet and Tonkeeper to suspend services.
TON inscription causes network congestion; Source: TON Chinese official channel
Another public chain, Conflux, has also experienced the same stress test. According to ConfluxScan data, affected by the upsurge of inscription activities, on December 15, the number of single-day transactions on Conflux reached 1.788 million, and the number of daily transactions on CFX reached 100,000. Both hit new highs for the year; the number of active accounts on that day reached 17,700. Additionally, Conflux daily transaction TPS exceeded 20 for the first time since early April 2021.
Conflux on-chain transaction TPS; Source: ConfluxScan
The inscription project on Avalanche also indirectly assumes the role of stress tester. On December 18, @cryptofishx, the co-founder of Trader Joe, the largest DEX on Avalanche, published an article launching the asc-20 standard inscription (Avascription) BEEG, and stated that the inscription has no roadmap and no actual use cases, and is just a social experiment.
It is reported that 37% of BEEG was minted within 2 hours and 15 minutes after its launch, with a total of approximately 4,300 holders. @cryptofishx apologizes for causing congestion on the Avalanche network and discusses solutions. According to Avascan data, during the minting process, the average gas fee of the Avalanche network reached 5,110.30 nAVAX (approximately US$4.41).
Avalanche network transaction fees; Source: Avascan
In addition to many public chains, Ethereum L2 also saw real results in the inscription test.
On December 16, Arbitrum officials stated that the Arbitrum One sequencer stopped running at 10:29 a.m. Eastern Time during a significant surge in network traffic. The official reason given was that Arbitrum’s The sequencer stops working, eventually causing the network to go down.
According to Arbiscan data, on December 15, the number of transactions on the Arbitrum chain surged to 4.39 million, setting a record high; at the same time, ultrasound money data showed that the Arbitrum L2 Sequencer Inbox contract destroyed the most ETH in the past 24 hours, reaching 795.7 ETH.
Followed closely by another major Layer 2, zkSync. On December 17, during the casting of SYNC inscriptions, the zkSync network also experienced a short-term downtime, and the blockchain browser did not show the block. Subsequently, the zkSync engineering director announced The tweet stated that despite reaching an unprecedented 150 TPS during the minting process, the network continued to perform its duties.
Encryption researcher HaoTian talked about thisthinkThis is a good stress test experiment for zkSync, and its positive impact outweighs the negative. In the long run, the inscription incident did not bring layer 2 performance back to the prototype as rumored, but instead provided practice for further performance optimization of layer 2. experience.
Previously, it has been a consensus that CEX has become the main driving force for Inscription to gain greater market visibility. However, now, the community jokes that a chain that has not issued Inscription is too embarrassed to come out. It can be seen that this power has been transferred to public chains and L2. Compared with Bitcoin, the new public chain and L2 have very sufficient block space. They are not afraid of network congestion, but are afraid of lack of active users and funds.
How long can the madness last?
On December 12, Binance co-founder He Yi spoke when participating in the Binance Chinese community AMA. He said that the Binance Web3 wallet does not support inscriptions for the time being because of previous thinking about the inscription track. He believes that the nature of inscriptions and NFTs will be similar and cyclical. The popularity will be relatively high, but there is still uncertainty about how it will develop after the popularity passes, so Binance may indeed have not invested enough in inscriptions. However, as a trading platform, you cannot decide products based on your own likes and dislikes. What is important to users must be satisfied as much as possible. Currently, Binance is already working overtime in relevant work, and it will continue to iterate on what users need.
This gives inscriptions another room for imagination, and with more and more inscription projects emerging, this track has become one of the fields with the strongest wealth effect today. But what followed was that the inscription has reached the stage of peaking, and everyone was waiting for the next price pump to exit at a profit.
Many people cant help but wonder, How long can the madness of Inscription last?
From the perspective of profit-taking, very few Inscription players who made the early layout are still in the game. Previously, crypto KOL Riyue Xiaochu wrote an article about a large company that earned millions of dollars from ORDI in May, and deployed SATS in July. After listing on Binance, it made a profit of 36 million U.S. dollars, achieving a huge leap in wealth. However, such an example is only circulated in the community as a wealth-making myth. Most people here just grab a few Guiling Gao (the communitys nickname for the Gui Ling inscription) and continue running to the next inscription.
But from an infrastructure perspective, we still don’t know the future of Inscription. The inscription infrastructure and its tokens on Bitcoin such as MultiBit and BitStable are still under construction. Although the current inscription craze on various public chains has made this track hot again, with a steady stream of inscription rushers pouring into it, it is of no value. The discovery made a group of crypto users who were accustomed to DeFi starting from scratch realize that if Inscription wants to be great again, it needs more dry wood to burn a stronger fire.
Now Inscription has reached the final stage of madness in the previous bull market. It doesn’t care about the value but only whether it is popular. Perhaps what matters is not how long Inscription can live, but how long you believe it can live.
