Performance lagging behind will indeed miss many use cases, but running into lag or even crashing will result in losing everything.

Author: Terry, Plain-language Blockchain

As the craze for inscriptions continues to spread from Bitcoin to other blockchains, in recent weeks, a series of corresponding "inscription projects" have emerged on Ethereum, Solana, EOS, TON, as well as IOST, Conflux, and other public chains. On-chain activities have surged, which can be considered a form of extreme stress test to some extent.

So, in the midst of this extreme stress test, how did the actual performance of public chains, which have often touted TPS and high performance, fare?

01 Congested Bitcoin, a feast for block producers

First, let's take a look at the Bitcoin network, which is at the center of the inscription craze. Its most obvious change is "network congestion and soaring transaction fees."

Similar to NFTs, inscriptions allow users to record various data on the blockchain. However, overall, because Bitcoin's transaction fees are paid according to the data size, inscription users tend to set relatively low transaction fees.

This also means that they are willing to wait longer for confirmation, which can easily lead to inscription transactions being replaced by more urgent Bitcoin transfers.

In this context, these massive but patient inscription transactions have overwhelmed the Bitcoin memory pool (where all valid transactions not yet officially added to the network are stored).

According to statistics from crypto KOL bitrabbit.btc, Bitcoin accumulated 87 million UTXOs over the past 14 years. However, after BRC20 trading began on April 24, the number surged to 140 million in about 7 months, with over 50 million of the newly added UTXOs consisting of extremely small transactions ranging from 100 to 1000 satoshis.

As shown in the image above, since its launch in February 2023, inscriptions have been the main consumer of Bitcoin block space, and the Bitcoin memory pool has been at full capacity since February, continuing to the present.

This has also led to Bitcoin's inability to clear its memory pool, and at the time of writing, it is at a historical high in terms of data recorded in BTC's history.

Given the current situation of the Bitcoin network, especially in order to prevent dust attacks, which require that Bitcoin transactions in a single UTXO not be less than 546 satoshis, the vast majority of the pending small-value transactions among the tens of millions of inscription transactions are essentially equivalent to DDoS attack junk transactions, which may never be packaged and broadcasted on the chain.

"Most of these small UTXOs will never be spent and will lie in Bitcoin nodes, wasting tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in hardware and power resources for the BTC network for decades to come."

This is also the main reason why Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr publicly criticized ORDI, inscriptions, and BRC20—"Inscriptions are using Bitcoin Core vulnerabilities to send garbage information to the blockchain."

However, for block producers, the inscription craze undoubtedly brought a season of abundance. OKLink's statistics show that before November, the transaction fee income accounted for 2%-5% of the block reward structure for Bitcoin block producers.

After the return of the inscription craze in November, the proportion of transaction fee income to the total income of block producers began to rise continuously, reaching over 10%, and even exceeding 20% on certain dates. As of the time of writing, it reached a recent high on December 14, reaching 25.84%, significantly increasing the income of block producers.

In addition, Dune data shows that the total transaction fees generated for block producers by Ordinals inscriptions have reached 3615 BTC (about $150 million).

Regardless of the future direction of inscriptions, to some extent, its emergence is closely related to the popularity of block producers. With the block reward for Bitcoin diminishing after each halving cycle and the continuous expansion of the entire Bitcoin network, the ecological incentives required to maintain the secure operation of the Bitcoin network are objectively increasing. This needs to gradually expand beyond block rewards.

Therefore, the emergence of Ordinals can be said to be timely, at least the new ecology endowed by programmability may explore an alternative incentive for block producers in the future, especially as block rewards continue to decrease.

02 "Ethereum Killer" and the performance of new public chains?

After the explosion of the Bitcoin inscription ecosystem, although there were jokes in the market that doing inscriptions on smart contract public chains such as Ethereum is a "downgrade by default," the inscription craze quickly spread from Bitcoin and Ethereum to other public chains.

In addition to PoW chains such as BCH, other smart contract public chains also entered the market, giving rise to a large number of inscription imitation projects, and also experienced a moment of truth.

• Ethereum: Gas fees breaking out of the bottom range

Before the surge in transaction fees caused by inscriptions such as ETHS, the on-chain transaction costs on Ethereum had been gradually decreasing since the middle of the year, reaching a low of $1.4 around October 14, the lowest level in 2023, with Gas also dropping to below 10.

However, starting from late October, with the wealth effect of Bitcoin inscriptions spilling over, ETHS began to usher in a new wave of craze, and Gas began to bottom out and rise, reaching the current range of 30-50, but still within a normal and acceptable range.

This allows non-financial and arbitrary data to be written to the Ethereum blockchain, as long as the file size does not exceed 96 kilobytes, users can engrave any type of file. According to its creator, although it currently only allows images, this will change in the future.

In fact, the engraving of ETHS uses the so-called Ethereum "call data (Calldata)," which is cheaper and more decentralized than using contract storage, and even presents the possibility of a new narrative for L2—compared to other L2 solutions (such as ZK, ARB), ETHS can achieve lower Gas costs than L2 without the need to switch networks.

• EOS: Severe congestion, intermittent suspension of transfers and coin minting

On December 9, the EOS network introduced inscription-inspired eoss coin minting activities, leading to a surge in on-chain activity on the EOS EVM chain, with the number of transactions exceeding 17 million, surpassing the total historical accumulated number of transactions on the chain.

Due to the surge in on-chain activity, it led to severe congestion in transaction processing on the EOS chain, resulting in long delays in transaction processing, with millions of transactions waiting to be processed.

• TON: "Fastest blockchain" in chaos

Previously planning to apply for the Guinness World Record as the "fastest blockchain" with claimed transaction volume of over 1 million per second, the TON blockchain also faced setbacks in the inscription craze.

After the TON network introduced the Tonado protocol inspired by Bitcoin Ordinals and led to a surge in activity, the network experienced long delays in transaction processing.

According to monitoring data from the blockchain status monitoring robot dTON, on December 7, there were over 2.5 million transactions waiting to be processed on the TON chain, and the transaction processing speed of the TON blockchain dropped to less than 1 transaction per second.

This situation also forced the TON cryptocurrency wallets, Wallet and Tonkeeper, to temporarily suspend their services.

• NEAR: Smooth, but with a unique approach

The inscription experience on NEAR has been reported to be very smooth, but the way inscription transactions are implemented in the NEAR market is somewhat unique:

Inscriptions are encapsulated into NRC-20 tokens on the NEAR public chain using official tools, and then traded on DEX platforms such as Ref on the NEAR chain, which is a bit unconventional.

• IOST: Feast for scientists

In addition, during the inscription process on IOST last night, the "fair launch" was heavily criticized and almost became a monopoly for scientists, with few opportunities for ordinary users to participate successfully. Twitter user @chems_zz reported that they tried over a dozen IOST private nodes, but the performance was disappointing.

03 Conclusion

Overall, in this wave of inscription stress test, regardless of the impressive data usually promoted, these high-performance public chains, which boast high speed and low cost, have consecutively encountered setbacks or underperformance in the inscription wave, laying bare their true capabilities under extreme stress testing.

In contrast, it is Bitcoin and Ethereum that have maintained good transaction execution despite network congestion and soaring transaction fees.

Time reveals the truth, and the diminishing allure of high-performance narratives in recent years is also closely related to this—what's most important for public chains is to provide a stable and liquid operational environment for transactions.

Lagging behind in performance will indeed miss many use cases, but running into lag or even crashing will result in losing everything.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。