Recursive Inscriptions
What are Recursive Inscriptions?
Recursive inscriptions leverage the recursion feature from Ord. Learn more about recursion here. With recursion, inscriptions gain additional features that allow them to use and integrate data directly within the inscription, enabling the generation of new art pieces.
Common Recursive Endpoints:
/content/<INSCRIPTION_ID>: This is the most commonly used and important recursive endpoint for collection creation. It allows inscriptions to fetch content from other inscriptions, leading to fascinating possibilities such as inscribing on-chain JavaScript libraries for use by any other inscription. This can be leveraged to reduce inscription costs significantly and bypasses the 4MB Bitcoin block limit.
/r/inscription/<INSCRIPTION_ID>: This endpoint provides information about the inscription itself, such as the sat and block height where it is inscribed. It can be useful when used with other recursive inscriptions.
/r/children/ and /r/parents: These endpoints provide information on the provenance of the inscriptions following the parent-child Ord specification.
Recursive Ordinals Collections
To launch an Ordinals collection, creators need to optimize their art files for on-chain inscription, as Bitcoin block space can be expensive. Using the /content/ recursive endpoint, we can reduce the costs of inscribing Ordinals collections by over 90%, while preserving the quality of the final image.
How does it work?
The general idea is to first inscribe the unique traits that will generate the collection on-chain. Once the traits are inscribed, JavaScript logic can use the /content/ endpoint to fetch the trait content from their on-chain inscriptions and then compose and render the final image directly on-chain. The final file size of the inscription will be around 170 bytes, without any difference in quality compared to non-recursive inscriptions.
At Luminex, we use our own Recursive inscription standard, BRC69, to merge the traits on-chain. You can learn more about BRC69 here.
Example: Little Pups
Little Pups is a 10,000 supply Ordinals collection launched on Luminex using the BRC69 standard. A single Little Pup image can be as large as 160KB or more. Inscribing these images as static inscriptions would incur high costs—at 30 sats/vB, a single image would cost around 0.012 BTC (approximately $750 at the time of writing). By using recursive inscriptions, the file size was reduced to 170 bytes while maintaining image quality. The cost to inscribe this file at 30 sats/vB is around 0.00005 BTC (approximately $3.5 at the time of writing). You can view an example here.
The Little Pups creator had to first inscribe all the collection traits. The total size of the traits to be inscribed was 2.6MB. At 30 sats/vB, the upfront cost was 0.1967 BTC (approximately $11,250 at the time of writing). However, using recursive inscriptions resulted in a 99%+ reduction in file size, greatly reducing total inscription costs for minters. Inscribing the full collection as static inscriptions would cost 120 BTC, whereas using recursive inscriptions reduced this to 0.5 BTC, saving 119.5 BTC (approximately $6.8M at the time of writing).
You can view all the traits here.
Estimate Recursive Inscriptions Costs
Inscribing the traits can be expensive, depending on the network fee level at which you plan to inscribe your traits as a creator. Inscription costs can range from less than $1,000 to over $10,000, as in the case of Little Pups.
If you are interested in launching a recursive inscription collection but are unsure where to start or how to estimate the costs of your traits, measure the total size of the traits you plan to inscribe. You can use the following Google Sheet to estimate the costs: Estimate Recursive Inscriptions Costs.
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