Properties

Inscriptions may include CBOR properties, stored as data pushes in fields with tag 17. Since data pushes are limited to 520 bytes, CBOR longer than 520 bytes must be split into multiple tag 17 fields, which will then be concatenated before decoding.

Properties are a structured counterpart to metadata. While metadata may contain arbitrary CBOR which has no protocol-defined meaning and is presented on /inscription as HTML, properties have protocol-defined meaning and must conform to a strict schema.

Indefinite-length types are not supported. All maps, arrays, byte strings, and text strings must be definite.

The non-normative CDDL schema of the properties value is as follows:

Properties = {
  ? 0: [*GalleryItem],
  * any => any,
}

GalleryItem = {
  ? 0: bstr .size (32..36),
  * any => any,
}

The above CDDL schema is provided as a convenience. As always, the ordinals reference implementation ord is the normative specification of inscriptions, and thus the properties field.

Fields matching the * any => any wildcard must be ignored, for compatibility with future additions.

Galleries

Inscriptions whose properties field contains GalleryItems are galleries.

Galleries contain GalleryItems, whose only defined key 0 contains a serialized inscription ID. Inscription ID TXIDiINDEX is serialized as a byte string containing the 32 byte TXID, concatenated with by the four-byte little-endian INDEX. Trailing zeros may be removed from four-byte INDEX, so IDs ending in i0 may be serialized in 32 bytes.

Gallery items are displayed on the inscriptions /inscription page on the explorer.

Galleries are similar to children, in that they provide a way to create collections of inscriptions. However, galleries are permissionless. Anyone may create a gallery including any inscriptions. Thus, inclusion in a gallery does not imply provenance. Additionally, because of this, inclusion in a gallery does not create a backlink from the gallery item's /inscription page to the gallery.

Galleries may be created when batch inscribing with ord wallet batch by including an array of string inscription IDs of under the gallery key of the inscription entry in the batch file, or when using ord wallet inscribe using the --gallery option.