GM

O Dearest and Most Wise Readers,

I'd love to hear from you as we head into the new year. Hit me with feedback, requests, anything that you'd want to see from us going forward. It's all fair game.

I try to respond to every reply! 🫡 

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

This mega trend is taking over

There’s a strange dark magic visiting every single blockchain, one by one, and in many cases leaving behind a trail of broken networks. 

It’s being called spam, gunk, a digital STD.

But others believe it’s a megatrend – a disruptive new crypto primitive. 

Dread it, run from it, Inscriptions still arrive. 

What’s happening? 

Inscription coins, which are almost pseudo NFTs, gained popularity on Bitcoin earlier this year with the BRC-20 template.

This let people turn unique satoshis (basically BTC “pennies”) into semi-fungible tokens that were part of larger coin tickers. 

And now, this same method is showing up across other chains including Avalanche, Arbitrum, and Solana. 

How does it work? 

The best analogy I’ve found compares this to Venmo. Anyone who uses Venmo or Cash App knows that each payment has a notes field where you can add context around the transaction (e.g. “paying for pizza”). 

Similarly, inscriptions take ordinary transactions and add data (text, images) to their notes section, known as calldata on EVM chains. 

An inscription coin is created when someone deploys a transaction with a note that includes a ticker and total supply. Then anyone can mint portions of that token through new transactions (burning block space) that point to that original ticker. 

But why? 

There are some advantages to inscriptions.

First, they’re much cheaper than NFTs since you don’t need to execute complex logic or store smart contract data. All you’re paying is the gas to send an otherwise normal 0-value transaction with mint instructions in the calldata. 

And second, some claim these are a fairer way of distributing any kind of token. Theoretically, anyone can mint as long as they burn a transaction, and certain inscriptions set up long time intervals and low minimums per wallet to keep whales at bay. 

There’s a simplicity to this: these are all free mints with no pre-sales or shady teams holding 90% of the supply waiting for a moment to dump (like many memecoins today). 

The downside is that there is basically no composability with smart contracts.

Plus, holders have to rely on offchain indexers to keep track of things, which as some have pointed out, feels like a step backward. 

How do you get one?

The easiest way is to send a transaction to yourself with mint instructions that include the inscription ticker and the amount you want to mint.

For example, Avascriptions provides mint instructions for Avalanche inscriptions that you can easily copy-paste yourself. 

Bottom line 

There’s a long line of networks getting clobbered by this, and in some cases facing complete outages due to the traffic (hello Arbitrum). 

For now, I look at it as an experimental new form of digital property that people are flocking to just in case it has staying power. 

Speculative demand is white hot at the moment, but it’s too early to have a hot take on how it’ll develop. 

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

Tiny Geometries

Curated and affordable generative art is on its way to the chain with Tiny Geometries, an Alba.art group show.

Eight creators make up the roster, including previous Art Blocks artists RalenArc and Stranger in the Q. The latter’s Wednesday release resonated with me.

Give the gift of (code) art these Holidays?

Paradise Lost by Ren AI

BrainDrops goes otaku for the first time with the 500-supply collection Paradise Lost, a mix of anime and AI art by pseudonymous artist Ren AI.

The aesthetic anime artwork, inspired by 90’s classics such as Cowboy Bebop (Cicero-approved), weaves a meta narrative as it explores a cyberpunk world where AI has become commonplace.

Perhaps part of a growing trend in narrative-focused AI collections.

Tales of the Underlog

If you were around for the 2021 NFT market peak, you might remember Non-Fungible Fungi, a collection of 10k mushrooms dropped when all you needed to get millions in trading volume was some cool animations (bless those days).

The team behind those is now working on Tales of the Underlog a collection of similarly cool-looking animations from the same artist, Elzie, but with a robot theme this time.

This one is also focused on narrative-building, with an interactive website that invites a sense of adventure. We’ll have to wait to learn more, though.