Inscriptions have exploded onto the crypto scene in recent weeks. It is one of the most notable, controversial, and viral innovations to happen on the Bitcoin blockchain in years.
But when this new innovation was launched, it lacked some notable features. One such feature was the ability to label Inscriptions to make them easy to find, identify, and categorize. On the flip side, people also had no way of searching for specific projects, Inscriptions, or creators. That’s why we built the Inscription search engine.
Let’s unpack how it works.
How to find Inscriptions on Digital Artifacts
Not all Inscriptions are currently searchable on the Digital Artifacts website. For an Inscription to be searchable, it must first be embedded with metadata (such as tags, keywords, categories, and names) using the Bitcoin blockchain. We’ll explain more about how this is done and why it works in the next section. But for now, all you need to know is this:
To find an Inscription:
- Simply go to Digital-Artifacts.io
- Type the details or keywords of the Inscription or collection you’d like to learn more about into the search box
- Click enter
And voila! You’ll see a screen detailing the Inscription or collection you searched. Here, you can access all the available metadata.
How the Inscription search engine works
It’s helpful to compare Inscriptions to NFTs. Inscriptions are non-fungible assets on the Bitcoin network in a similar way to how NFTs are non-fungible art on the Ethereum network. But one major difference between NFTs and Inscriptions is a little term called “Provenance.”
Casey Rodarmor, the Ordinals protocol creator, described it this way: “Provenance is the ability to determine the author of an inscription, or its membership in a set of inscriptions all created by the same person.”
In other words: Inscriptions lacked Provenance, which means they lacked metadata and context. Practically speaking, that means you couldn’t tell much about an Inscription beyond what you could see in the art itself.
Without dedicating manual processes to give each Inscription context, there used to be no tool for adding Provence to Inscriptions.
That’s at least until a few weeks ago.
To help move Bitcoin to the next level, we created a system for embedding Inscription metadata into NFTs. Once Inscriptions have metadata on the Ethereum network through NFTs, their data can be logged, categorized, and searched. That’s essentially how Digital-Artifacts.io works.
What you can learn about Inscriptions
Once an Inscription’s metadata has been embedded into an NFT, the Inscription will be available for search on Digital-Artifacts.io. Here’s exactly what you can learn about an Inscription through the search engine:
- Who is the original creator?
- Is this part of a larger collection?
- What other Inscriptions are part of this collection?
- When was the Inscription created?
- What links, traits, or text information are attached to the image?
With a search engine vs. without a search engine
Before Digital-Artifacts.io was created, the only way to find and categorize Inscriptions was through hard manual work. Someone had to mediate and confirm the creator of a specific Inscription and then make that ownership known (usually by just announcing it on a Discord channel in the course of a sale).
This has many problems. The first and most important problem is that you don’t have real proof of ownership of an inscription. People can claim to create or own collections and there’s no way for someone to prove them right or wrong. The process is prone to both fraud and human error.
Without a search engine, it’s also time-consuming to discover specific collections or Inscriptions. Even the most well-known Inscriptions are scattered across the web, with no central hub for tracking information about them.
By incorporating NFTs, we built a trustless system for organizing and categorizing Inscriptions.
How to upload your Inscriptions to Digital-Artifacts.io
Inscriptions are automatically uploaded to Digital-Artifacts.io. Our system scans existing inscriptions so that you can locate them in the explorer, even if you created them somewhere else.
You can also Inscribe through Digital-Artifacts.io:
- Simply go to Digital-Artifacts.io
- Upload the picture
- Add any parameters and context that you’d like embedded in the asset
- Click Inscribe when you’re ready
Your Inscription will immediately be discoverable on the search engine.
Additionally, for those who created their inscriptions somewhere else, we are planning to add a feature to add metadata to it (retroactively). This is the next update for the platform—so stay tuned!
This brings us to an important discussion: What’s next for Digital-Artifacts.io?
The future of Inscription search
As Digital-Artifacts.io’s network grows, so will the available Inscriptions and information. Inscriptions are still a new technology and Digital-Artifacts.io is the first search engine for locating them.
In the meantime, there are other things to look forward to. One of the most obvious next steps for our team is to build a marketplace component into the search engine. It will soon be possible not only to discover Inscriptions on Digital-Artifacts.io, but also to purchase them.
What features would you like to see added to Digital-Artifacts.io?
