Just a year ago, the concept of engraving artwork, games, and even meme tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain would have been hard to fathom; however, the emergence of Ordinals has made this a reality, with the latest achievement being the introduction of a fully on-chain music engine on the Bitcoin network over the weekend.
Using the Bitcoin blockchain, the “Descent Into Darkness Music Engine” was engraved and made available as 10 individual Ordinals, with each edition being minted and sold on Saturday.
With the ability to input a few keywords, anyone, not just the inscription owner, can effortlessly produce a music track in an instant.
The Descent Into Darkness Music Engine was developed by the pseudonymous independent developer Ratoshi to supplement their text-based RPG, with the final sound outputs adopting a vintage “chiptune” quality, and Ratoshi utilized OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help with creating the sounds embedded within the blockchain-based application.
As an application embedded within the Bitcoin blockchain, it shares parallels with other Bitcoin-based games and applications, such as the original camera-based Chainspace, as well as recreations of games like Doom and Pac-Man.
The music engine built on Bitcoin utilizes a new advancement in the Ordinals community called “recursive inscriptions,” which developers have recently introduced.
In the past, inscriptions existed in isolation and lacked the ability to interact with each other. However, with the introduction of recursive inscriptions, Ordinals now have the capability to access data from previously inscribed assets on the blockchain, akin to how smart contracts in Ethereum can point to various destinations, enabling composability.
By implementing recursive inscriptions, developers within the Ordinals community are able to overcome the limitations of Bitcoin inscriptions, which are restricted to 4MB of block storage. This capacity is significantly smaller compared to what is required for contemporary video game projects and other large-scale applications.
One of the key benefits of the improved storage efficiency is that it significantly lowers the costs associated with on-chain projects on Bitcoin. This means that developers can scale their inscription data directly on the blockchain itself, without the need for layer-2 solutions, which ultimately leads to long-term cost savings.
According to Ratoshi, thanks to recursive inscriptions, he only needs to inscribe the code once. Subsequent inscriptions require much smaller HTML files that can reuse the pre-inscribed JavaScript files for future projects.
For instance, Ratoshi provided an example where instead of incurring $40 worth of Bitcoin network fees for each inscription in a larger-scale project, they could pay $40 for the initial inscription and a significantly smaller fee for the subsequent inscriptions. This could result in a substantial difference, with fees as low as $5 for the later inscriptions.
The potential cost savings associated with placing media and applications on the Bitcoin blockchain are significant, and recursive inscriptions have the ability to unleash a wave of innovation among various projects in the Ordinals community. An example of this is the NFT project OnChainMonkey, which, as highlighted by Ord.io founder Leonidas, is utilizing this feature to incorporate 3D artwork onto the blockchain with an inscription size of less than 1KB.
In January, developer Casey Rodarmor launched Ordinals, taking advantage of a loophole in Bitcoin’s 2021 Taproot upgrade. This loophole allowed the inscription of different data file formats on the Bitcoin blockchain, which was used to create Ordinals code.
Every Ordinal is linked to a single satoshi, which is the smallest unit of measurement of Bitcoin (1/100,000,000 BTC). The Ordinals protocol’s introduction has led to the emergence of a burgeoning marketplace for asset trading on Bitcoin, similar to NFTs and meme tokens. Since January, more than 14.6 million Ordinals have been inscribed.
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