Ordinal Inscription Guide

Individual sats can be inscribed with arbitrary content, creating Bitcoin-native digital artifacts that can be held in a Bitcoin wallet and transferred using Bitcoin transactions. Inscriptions are as durable, immutable, secure, and decentralized as Bitcoin itself.

Working with inscriptions requires a Bitcoin full node, to give you a view of the current state of the Bitcoin blockchain, and a wallet that can create inscriptions and perform sat control when constructing transactions to send inscriptions to another wallet.

Bitcoin Core provides both a Bitcoin full node and wallet. However, the Bitcoin Core wallet cannot create inscriptions and does not perform sat control.

This requires ord, the ordinal utility. ord doesn't implement its own wallet, so ord wallet subcommands interact with Bitcoin Core wallets.

This guide covers:

  1. Installing Bitcoin Core
  2. Syncing the Bitcoin blockchain
  3. Creating a Bitcoin Core wallet
  4. Using ord wallet receive to receive sats
  5. Creating inscriptions with ord wallet inscribe
  6. Sending inscriptions with ord wallet send
  7. Receiving inscriptions with ord wallet receive

Getting Help

If you get stuck, try asking for help on the Ordinals Discord Server, or checking GitHub for relevant issues and discussions.

Installing Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin Core is available from bitcoincore.org on the download page.

Making inscriptions requires Bitcoin Core 24 or newer.

This guide does not cover installing Bitcoin Core in detail. Once Bitcoin Core is installed, you should be able to run bitcoind -version successfully from the command line.

Configuring Bitcoin Core

ord requires Bitcoin Core's transaction index.

To configure your Bitcoin Core node to maintain a transaction index, add the following to your bitcoin.conf:

txindex=1

Or, run bitcoind with -txindex:

bitcoind -txindex

Syncing the Bitcoin Blockchain

To sync the chain, run:

bitcoind -txindex

…and leave it running until getblockcount:

bitcoin-cli getblockcount

agrees with the block count on a block explorer like the mempool.space block explorer. ord interacts with bitcoind, so you should leave bitcoind running in the background when you're using ord.

Installing ord

The ord utility is written in Rust and can be built from source. Pre-built binaries are available on the releases page.

You can install the latest pre-built binary from the command line with:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsLS https://ordinals.com/install.sh | bash -s

Once ord is installed, you should be able to run:

ord --version

Which prints out ord's version number.

Creating a Bitcoin Core Wallet

ord uses Bitcoin Core to manage private keys, sign transactions, and broadcast transactions to the Bitcoin network.

To create a Bitcoin Core wallet named ord for use with ord, run:

ord wallet create

Receiving Sats

Inscriptions are made on individual sats, using normal Bitcoin transactions that pay fees in sats, so your wallet will need some sats.

Get a new address from your ord wallet by running:

ord wallet receive

And send it some funds.

You can see pending transactions with:

ord wallet transactions

Once the transaction confirms, you should be able to see the transactions outputs with ord wallet outputs.

Creating Inscription Content

Sats can be inscribed with any kind of content, but the ord wallet only supports content types that can be displayed by the ord block explorer.

Additionally, inscriptions are included in transactions, so the larger the content, the higher the fee that the inscription transaction must pay.

Inscription content is included in transaction witnesses, which receive the witness discount. To calculate the approximate fee that an inscribe transaction will pay, divide the content size by four and muliply by the fee rate.

Inscription transactions must be less than 400,000 weight units, or they will not be relayed by Bitcoin Core. One byte of inscription content costs one weight unit. Since an inscription transaction includes not just the inscription content, limit inscription content to less than 400,000 weight units. 390,000 weight units should be safe.

Creating Inscriptions

To create an inscription with the contents of FILE, run:

ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate FEE_RATE FILE

Ord will output two transactions IDs, one for the commit transaction, and one for the reveal transaction, and the inscription ID. Inscription IDs are of the form TXIDiN, where TXID is the transaction ID of the reveal transaction, and N is the index of the inscription in the reveal transaction.

The commit transaction commits to a tapscript containing the contents of the inscription, and the reveal transaction spends from that tapscript, revealing the contents on chain and inscribing them on the first sat of the first output of the reveal transaction.

Wait for the reveal transaction to be mined. You can check the status of the commit and reveal transactions using the mempool.space block explorer.

Once the reveal transaction has been mined, the inscription ID should be printed when you run:

ord wallet inscriptions

And when you visit the ordinals explorer at ordinals.com/inscription/INSCRIPTION_ID.

Sending Inscriptions

Ask the recipient to generate a new address by running:

ord wallet receive

Send the inscription by running:

ord wallet send --fee-rate <FEE_RATE> <ADDRESS> <INSCRIPTION_ID>

See the pending transaction with:

ord wallet transactions

Once the send transaction confirms, the recipient can confirm receipt by running:

ord wallet inscriptions

Receiving Inscriptions

Generate a new receive address using:

ord wallet receive

The sender can transfer the inscription to your address using:

ord wallet send ADDRESS INSCRIPTION_ID

See the pending transaction with:

ord wallet transactions

Once the send transaction confirms, you can can confirm receipt by running:

ord wallet inscriptions