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:
- Installing Bitcoin Core
- Syncing the Bitcoin blockchain
- Creating a Bitcoin Core wallet
- Using
ord wallet receiveto receive sats - Creating inscriptions with
ord wallet inscribe - Sending inscriptions with
ord wallet send - 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 multiply 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 content of the inscription, and the reveal transaction spends from that tapscript, revealing the content on chain and inscribing it on the first sat of the input that contains the corresponding tapscript.
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
Parent Child Inscriptions
A child inscription is an inscription that is a child of another inscription. See provenance for more information.
get the parent inscription id <PARENT_INSCRIPTION_ID> from the output of ord wallet inscriptions
ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate FEE_RATE --parent <PARENT_INSCRIPTION_ID> CHILD_FILE"
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