Home
News
With the emergence of Ethscriptions in June this year, the crypto space assumed another innovation unfolding down the road. Before the Ethereum-based inscriptions protocol could pick up pace, it met with a bump. The protocol saw the minting of a significant collection within hours of launch: Ethereum Punks. And now the Ethscribed punks on Ethereum are gone from the official website.
Co-founder and former CEO of music website Genius.com, Tom Lehman created Ethscriptions. The protocol was released on June 17, 2023, and became the talk of the town within a matter of hours. Ethereum Punks was among the first collection over the network having 10,000 Ethscribed punks.
The idea of inscriptions already gained a lot of heat following the launch of Bitcoin Ordinals in January this year. However, many argued, including the Ethscriptions creator, that the concept of Ethscriptions has been around since 2016, but became a formal protocol with the website and “indexer” after Middlemarch, popular name of Lehman, developed them.
Akin to Bitcoin Ordinals Inscriptions, Ethscriptions allow users to inscribe “non-financial data.” Where it was to put data on individual Satoshi (SAT) on Bitcoin, Etheruem-based inscriptions use transaction call data. They are considered NFTs without NFTs.
The official website offers easy creation of Ethscriptions and suggests step-by-step procedures. Though it is meant to allow sharing of data, it is currently limited to sharing only images. As the website noted, an image size of less than 90 kilobytes (KB) needs to be converted to a Base 64-encoded data URI using specific tools. Then the converted data is sent to hex using tools again for further conversion.
Ethscriptions uses 0 ETH transactions which could be sent to someone or to self. Following the steps mentioned over the website, one can easily mint an Ethscribed token within a minute, says some creators.
As mentioned earlier, Ethereum Punks were the earliest and significant collections on the platform. The collection has a similar appearance to the popular NFT collection from Yuga Labs, CryptoPunks.
Recently Ethscriptions creator Middlemarch announced the taking down of the official website of its prominent collection Ethereum Punks. He cited the reason for CryptoPunks creator Yuga Labs to request for the same.
At the request of Yuga Labs, the owner of CryptoPunks, I am taking down the Ethereum Punks website, removing all Ethereum Punks images from https://t.co/ZcR9HKlexS, and deleting my Tweets that reference Ethereum Punks, including my Tweet introducing the Ethscriptions Protocol.
— Middlemarch (@dumbnamenumbers) July 11, 2023
In addition to the website takedown, the Ethereum Punks images were also erased from Etherescriptions.com website. Middlemarch even deleted his Tweets related to the Ethereum inscribed collection.
Earlier the website used to have the content as the image shows above. But now the address shows the error as the image shows below.
Until the time of writing, there is no official comment or confirmation from Yuga Labs about the instance. The Ethereum Punks deleting announcement was the last message from Middlemarch until now.
Mr. Pratik chadhokar is an Indian Forex, Cryptocurrencies and Financial Market Advisor and analyst with a background in IT and Financial market Strategist. He specialises in market strategies and technical analysis and has spent over a year as a financial markets contributor and observer. He possesses strong technical analytical skills and is well known for his entertaining and informative analysis of the Financial markets.
