Inscriptions

Content bound to a single zat, immutable once written.

What an inscription is

An inscription attaches content — an image, a piece of text, a JSON record — to a single zatoshi. The content is written into a Zcash transaction, and the zat that carries it can be held and transferred with ordinary transparent wallet operations. No contract, no registry, no external storage.

Content types

Images: PNG, JPEG, GIF, SVG and WebP.
Text: plain text, Markdown, HTML and JSON.
Audio and short video, subject to size limits.
Protocol records used by applications, such as the zord-20 token namespace.

Envelope format

An inscription is an envelope: a content type, an optional set of fields, and a body. Fields cover metadata, pointers and provenance.

Field	Purpose
content_type	MIME type of the body
parent	Id of the parent inscription, for provenance
metadata	Arbitrary structured data about the artifact
pointer	Which zat in the outputs receives the inscription

Application records

Protocol records are compact JSON objects. The p field identifies the protocol, op the operation, and the remainder is operation-specific.

json

{
  "p": "zord-20",
  "op": "transfer",
  "ticker": "EXMPL",
  "amt": "12500.0",
  "to": "t1..."
}

Identity and ownership

Each inscription has an id of the form <txid>i<index> and is owned by whoever controls the output holding its zat. Transfer is just a spend.

Inscriptions cannot be edited or deleted. Anything you inscribe — including metadata you forgot to strip — is public and permanent.