Today, the creator of the Ethscriptions protocol, Tom Lehman (alias Middlemarch), announced on Twitter that the Ethereum Scripture Virtual Machine (ESC VM) is officially live after testing on Goerli.

After a series of events including market theft, scripture skyrocketing, and market speculation, where will "retro-style" ETHS go? What new features does the recently launched ESC VM have, and how will it "empower" ETHS? This is the story of how ETHS replicated Bitcoin scripture on Ethereum, starting from the origin of ETH. Oladay will tell you.

ETHS: Ordinals on Ethereum

In early July, Tom Lehman launched the Ethscriptions protocol. In the Chinese world, this project is more commonly known as ETHS. Tom Lehman was the co-founder of Capsule 21, former CEO of Genius, and co-founder.

What is interesting about this project is that in our impression, technology seems to be evolving towards a more "advanced" direction. Supporting more universal computing, implementing more complex functions, and executing more complex smart contracts "should" be the direction of development in the crypto world. However, ETHS has a sense of "returning to simplicity".

Similar to the previously popular Bitcoin scripture (Ordinals), ETHS also introduces a new method of writing data on the chain. Specifically, in Ethereum transactions, calldata is a "comment field". For example, when there is a hacking event, the commonly seen "on-chain chat" is often based on this field. And when interacting with smart contracts, this field is also used to pass information to the smart contract.

ETHS is similar to NFT but with some differences. This product uses the calldata field of Ethereum transactions to store data. ETHS is much cheaper than NFT, with the project claiming that its cost is 40 times lower than NFT. Such a large difference is because NFT uses expensive smart contracts, while ETHS does not.

In the design of ETHS, they store the data they need (such as NFT) in this field. Users convert URI data (Uniform Resource Identifier) into hexadecimal format using tools like hexhero. They then initiate a transaction on the blockchain and store the hexadecimal data in the calldata field, thereby achieving data storage on the chain in disguise.

This is how an "inscription" on the Ethereum network is created. Currently, ETHS has a maximum file size limit of about 90 KB and does not require smart contracts.

Introducing VM to Add "Smartness" to the "Not Smart"?

On July 17th, shortly after its launch, ETHS faced its first major test. ETHS's marketplace, Ethscriptions.com, was hacked, and a large number of inscriptions were stolen. In this attack, approximately 123 individual addresses lost a total of about 202 Ethscriptions. Previously, ETHS had already experienced a sharp increase, with the price of certain Ethscriptions reaching as high as 5 ETH.

This vulnerability can be traced back to a smart contract created by two co-founders, which contains a small piece of code that allows people to withdraw Ethscriptions that do not belong to them from the market.

However, this issue has been resolved. The founders have stated that they have reached out to many users affected by this vulnerability.

On July 25th, Ethscriptions V2 was officially launched. In addition, a new protocol called ESIP-2 for the Ethereum subscription market was introduced.

The launch of the new market has once again ignited the trading enthusiasm for ETHS. According to OpenSea data, the total trading volume has reached 638 ETH so far.

Today, the testnet for ESC VM is online, leading ETHS towards a new trajectory.

In the ESIP-4 proposal, Ethereum Inscriptions introduced the virtual machine. This is a new protocol built on top of Ethscriptions. ESC VM empowers ETHS with computational capabilities. And ETHS also introduces a contract system called "Dumb Contracts" which allows users to interact with them through inscriptions.

It is important to note that a "Dumb Contract," as the name suggests, is not a true smart contract, and ESC VM is not a true virtual machine either.

ESC VM provides a similar environment to the EVM for dumb contracts. Dumb contracts can perform two commands: deploy (create new contracts) and invoke (call state-changing functions of existing contracts).

Interaction with such contracts is a more specialized way of interaction. By storing them through inscriptions, they bypass the execution and storage costs of the EVM. This also allows dumb contracts to obtain much lower fees compared to smart contracts. However, it is precisely because of this that such contracts lack universality and cannot achieve complex on-chain computations like true virtual machines.

How to understand ESC VM more simply? In the official documentation, it provides a very concise explanation - BRC-20 is a groundbreaking technology, and ESC VM aims to improve upon BRC-20. ESC VM attempts to make fundamental improvements to BRC-20. (But the official documentation does not specify which improvements are considered "fundamental".)

Currently, the deployed ESC VM in the testnet can already achieve basic DEX functionality.

"We're playing with something very new."

No doubt, the fire of BRC-20 has inspired ETHS, and their official documentation praises BRC-20 generously.

Furthermore, the high degree of centralization in the NFT market is also one of the main reasons for the birth of ETHS. The team openly admits in the documentation that in the current NFT market, a large number of NFTs, whether in terms of image storage or NFT sales, are highly centralized. Just think about how many images of fake NFTs you have already collected that have been lost? And the sales process is even more terrifying.

The fair release of BRC-20 solves the issue of team centralization. And this has inspired the birth of ETHS.

When Bitcoin Inscription was introduced, the meme market celebrated. It is a "genuinely rooted" meme product, where users can achieve "token issuance" functionality on the truly decentralized Layer 1 network of BTC, and the tokens have no reserved supply or inflation. The most primitive Inscription (not smart contracts) has actually achieved "decentralization," which even advanced public chains today find difficult to accomplish.

And ETHS also has the same characteristics. The team of ETHS believes that this protocol completely changes the NFT landscape and provides a new solution for fully decentralized on-chain storage. They believe that "this may open up new creative expressions and redefine the way we perceive digital assets in the future."

But before being attracted by its fascinating narrative, let's go back to the beginning - do you remember completely decentralized Bitcoin?

When people got tired of the non-smart contract, "outdated" BTC network, ETH was born. When people found that smart contracts made everything so complicated, they returned to the BTC network to seek the original decentralization: trading on the non-smart "smart" BRC network, trading inscriptions on the smart EVM network pretending to be "not smart," implementing the "smart" dumb contracts on the pretending-not-smart ETHS... As Mark Twain said, history never repeats itself, but it rhymes.

When will this game of constant "pretending" innovation end?