"Inscription fever" brings a stress test, can the public chains outside the BTC catch this splash of wealth?

Author | Terry

Produced by vernacular blockchain

As the inscription fever continues to spread from BTC to other chains, in recent weeks, a large number of corresponding “inscription projects” have emerged in a series of public chains such as ETH, Solana, EOS, TON and even IOST and Conflux, and the on-chain activity has surged, which can be regarded as an extreme stress test to some extent.

In this extreme stress test, what is the actual performance of the public chains that used to pride themselves on TPS and high performance?

01, congested BTC, a feast for block producers

First of all, let’s take a look at the BTC network at the center of the inscription frenzy, and its most intuitive change is “network congestion, fee surge”.

Inscriptions are similar to NFTs in that they allow users to record a variety of data onto the blockchain, but overall since BTC transaction fees are paid based on the size of the data, inscription users tend to set relatively low transaction fees.

This also means that they are willing to wait longer for confirmation, which can easily lead to inscription transactions being replaced by more urgent BTC transfers. **

Against this backdrop, the flood of inscription transactions that are willing to queue up has squeezed out the BTC mempool (where all valid transactions are stored) that have not been officially added to the network.

According to crypto KOL bitrabbit.btc, BTC has accumulated 87 million UTXOs in the past 14 years, but after BRC20 began trading on April 24, it soared to 140 million in about 7 months,** and of the more than 50 million UTXOs added, 40 million were very small transactions of 100-1000 satosos. **

As you can see from the image above, since its launch in February 2023, **Inscription has been a major consumer of BTC chunk space, and in February BTC the mempool started to be fully loaded and continues to this day. **

As a result, the BTC network has not been able to clean up its memory pool, and at the time of writing, it is at the highest level in BTC history.

According to the actual situation of the current BTC network, especially the BTC network, in order to prevent dust attacks, the BTC transactions in a single UTXO must not be less than 546 satoshis or so, which means that the vast majority of the tens of millions of inscription transactions are actually equivalent to the spam transactions of DDoS attacks, which may not be packaged and broadcast on the chain for a lifetime. **

“Most of these small UTXOs will never be spent, but will always lie in BTC nodes, causing tens of billions of dollars of wasted hardware and power resources to the BTC network for tens and hundreds of years to come.”

This is the main reason why BTC client-side Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr has publicly lashed out at ORDI, Inscriptions, and BRC20 — “Inscriptions are using Bitcoin Core vulnerabilities to spam blockchains.” **

For block generators, though, the inscription craze has undoubtedly brought a bumper season. **OKLink statistics show that prior to November, fee income hovered in the 2%-5% range of BTC block reward structure for block producers.

Since the return of the inscription fever in November, the proportion of fee income in the total income of block generators has continued to rise, rising all the way to more than 10%, and even to more than 20% on some days, and as of the time of writing, it has hit a recent high of 25.84% on December 14, significantly increasing the income of block generators.

In addition, Dune data shows that the total transaction fees generated by Ordinals inscriptions for block generators have reached 3,615 BTC (about $150 million).

No matter where the inscription goes in the future, to a certain extent, its emergence is closely related to the explosion and the block generation group - with the decay of the block reward after the BTC round of halving cycles, and the continuous expansion of the scale of the entire BTC network, the ecological incentives required to maintain the BTC network security operation are objectively growing, which needs to be gradually expanded beyond the block reward.

Therefore, the emergence of Ordinals can be said to be timely, at least the new ecological possibility given by programmability, which can explore a new alternative block generator incentive method after the block reward continues to decrease in the future.

02. How are the “ETH Killers” and the new public chains performing?

After the explosion of the BTC inscription ecology, although there are also jokes in the market that it is “automatic downgrade” to engage in inscriptions on smart contract public chains such as ETH, the inscription craze has also begun to spread rapidly from BTC and ETH to other public chains. **

In addition to PoW chains such as BCH, other smart contract public chains have also entered the market, and a large number of inscription imitation disk gameplay projects have emerged, and they have also experienced a wave of real moments.

• ETH Fang: Gas fee out of the bottom range

Prior to the surge in transaction fees caused by the popularity of inscriptions such as ETHS, the cost of on-chain transactions has been gradually declining since the middle of the year, until it hit its lowest level of $1.4 in 2023 near October 14, and Gas has also come below the 10 range.ETH

But since late October, as the BTC inscription wealth effect has spilled over, ETHS has begun to usher in a new wave of craze, and Gas has also begun to bottom out**, rising all the way to today’s 30-50 range, but it is still in the normal acceptable range.

This allows non-financial and arbitrary data to be written to the ETH blockchain, and users can burn any type of file as long as the file size does not exceed 96 kilobytes. According to its creators, although at the moment it only allows images – this will change in the future.

In fact, the burning of ETHS makes use of the so-called “Calldata” of the ETH, which is cheaper and more decentralized than using contract storage, and there is even the possibility of a new L2 narrative - **ETHS can achieve cheaper gas than L2 without network switching compared to other L2 solutions (such as ZK, ARB). **

• EOS: Severe congestion, intermittent suspension of transfer and minting services

On December 9th, the EOS network introduced an Ordinals-inspired inscription eoss minting event, resulting in a surge in on-chain activity on the EOS EVM chain, with the number of transactions surging to over 17 million, more than the total number of transactions in the chain’s previous history.

Due to the surge in on-chain activity, the transaction processing speed on the EOS chain was severely stuck, and the transaction processing on the EOS network experienced a long delay, with millions of transactions waiting to be processed.

• TON: “The fastest blockchain” is in a hurry

The TON blockchain, which previously planned to apply for the Guinness World Record as the “fastest blockchain” and claimed to have more than 1 million transactions per second, also suffered a waterloo in the inscription boom.

**After the TON network introduced Tonado, a protocol inspired by BTC Ordinals-inspired and caused a spike in activity, the network experienced a long delay in transaction processing. **

According to the monitoring data of the blockchain status monitoring robot dTON, on December 7 TON there were more than 2.5 million transactions waiting to be processed on the chain, while the transaction processing speed of the TON blockchain dropped to less than 1 per second.

The situation also led to the suspension of TON cryptocurrency wallets Wallet and Tonkeeper.

• NEAR: Silky, but unique

Although NEAR’s inscription experience has been reported to be very smooth, the way its inscription market transactions are implemented is somewhat unique:

**Encapsulating the inscription into an NRC-20 token on the NEAR public chain through an official tool, and then going to a DEX on the NEAR chain such as Ref for trading, is a bit unusual. **

IOST: A Feast for Scientists

In addition, during the inscription of IOST last night, the “fair launch” was criticized, and it almost became a charter for scientists, and ordinary users rarely had the opportunity to successfully participate. Twitter user @chems_zz reported running more than a dozen IOST private nodes, all of which showed a pull.

03, Summary

On the whole, in this wave of inscription examinations, no matter how dazzling the data is usually advertised, these high-performance, low-cost public chains that focus on high speed and low cost have successively encountered Waterloo or poor performance under the wave of inscriptions, nakedly showing the real level under the extreme stress test.

**In contrast, the BTC and ETH have been performing well despite mainnet congestion and soaring transaction fees. **

In recent years, the high-performance narrative is no longer so sexy, and it has a lot to do with it - the public chain, the most important thing is to provide a stable trading liquidity operating environment.

If you lag behind in performance, you will indeed miss out on many use case scenarios, but if you run lag or even go down, you will lose everything.