# BTC Inscription and Its predicament

## What is Inscription

The term “inscription” comes from the ordinal protocol, which brought the declarative asset method to BTC through OP\_RETURN, and at the same time, a token protocol like BRC-20 was born. BRC-20 solves the awkward situation that BTC does not have smart contracts and cannot customize assets on the chain by declaring on the chain and indexing off the chain, which has brought a vigorous vitality to the BTC chain that lacks ecology.

## The Predicament of Inscription

However, looking back, the implementation of inscription through ordinal is more like a helpless move. The off-chain indexing highly depends on the consciousness and accuracy of the indexer. The recent incident of Binance using a different indexer from unisat during the ordi indexing, which led to the hard fork storm of ordi (https://www.theblockbeats.info/flash/199500), illustrates this risk. Even though the data on the chain can be verified, the huge cost of verification and the centralized management method have caused the inscription to lose its original intention of decentralization, and it has become more of a centralized operation dictated by the trading platform. The so-called on-chain is more like a conceptual fig leaf.

At the same time, the huge storage overhead brought by the inscription has made the BTC chain crowded, which undoubtedly has brought some disgust from conservative developers. The recent storm defining the inscription as a loophole corroborates this view.

## Preliminary Exploration of Rune-Based Solutions on BTC

In order to solve the problems brought by the brc-20 related protocol. The Runes protocol was designed. Runes is designed for ease of use and is expected to bring some influential changes to the Bitcoin token ecosystem. By following Bitcoin’s UTXO model, runes provide a form of “harm reduction” by reducing unnecessary inflation of the UTXO set, which is a major problem with existing protocols such as BRC-20 and Stamps.
