Digital artifacts
Think of a digital artifact as a physical object that happens to live on a chain.
A digital artifact is something you can hold, lose, break or give away without asking permission. Most things called NFTs fail that test: the image sits on a company's server, the contract has an owner key, and the collection can be changed after the fact.
The four tests
- Complete — all of the content is on-chain. If a link can rot, it is not an artifact.
- Immutable — nobody, including the creator, can alter it after inscription.
- Unrestricted — it can be transferred freely, with no allowlist, no pause switch and no royalty enforcement contract.
- Unconditionally owned — holding the key that controls the zat is the whole of ownership.
Why zOrdinals inscriptions qualify
Inscription content is written into a Zcash transaction, so it is complete and immutable once mined. There is no admin contract, because there is no contract at all — an inscription moves when the zat carrying it is spent by an ordinary transparent transaction. The only privilege anyone has over an artifact is the private key to the output that holds it.
Artifacts are not free of trade-offs: on-chain content costs block space, so inscriptions are small by nature. Constraint is part of the medium.