Solana Inscription Market: A frenetic and scramble for tickets

作者：深潮TechFlow

“The opportunities that seem to be given away for nothing are often difficult to get through.”

With the emergence of BRC-20 at the beginning of the year and the repeated popularity of inscriptions in the Bitcoin ecosystem in recent months, the market has been completely ignited.

After the influx of funds into the virgin land of the Bitcoin inscription market, there was also a significant FOMO effect, and liquidity began to spill over to other ecosystems. If there is no inscription on the new ecology, the market will always concoct a new one, and then there will be a scramble to play the inscription game.

Since the inscription is relatively fair, and there is no pre-mining and VC, for leeks and retail investors, this is equivalent to a free opportunity to pick up money.

But only if you have to hurry.

Take the Lamp inscription that suddenly became popular on Solana yesterday as an example, unlike the previous dragon inscription Sols on Solana, which was actively called out by the project party, Lamp was proposed by a Twitter user @babla11001 without warning, following the SPL-20 format, with a total supply of 210,000, and released a step-by-step tutorial for inscriptions in the form of a long tweet.

And when you are still studying how the Lamp suddenly appeared, what the SPL-20 format is, and doubting whether it is air, the frenzied market only talks about efficiency, not reason.

In just 3 hours or so after babla was posted, the eligible LAMP inscriptions have been quickly typed. LAMP then began trading in Magic Elden and OKX’s Web3 wallets, and as of press time, the price of a single LAMP inscription came to 0.3 SOL.

Roughly estimated, the cost of a single LAMP inscription is about 1-2 U, and at the current floor price of a lamp, it will be profitable.

The author found the lamp earlier, but the results were not successful. Under the multiple benefits of the local hot spots of the inscription and the inflow of Solana funds, the difficulty of competition has also doubled.

Large-scale ticket grabbing scene, if you fall behind, you will be beaten

Looking back at the whole process of Lamp inscription yesterday, it seems to have experienced a Spring Festival or a concert to grab tickets.

But the difference with that feeling is that you don’t know exactly what you’re grabbing, you just know exactly what it means.

When the Lamp inscription operation strategy posted by babla was not fully understood, a “rule supplement” post completely detonated FOMO emotions:

"After the lamp inscription is played, there is still a key verification step, without which the inscription cannot be traded on the trading market. ”

According to the relevant website, there are only 50,000 inscriptions that can be verified, on a first-come, first-served basis, and in the process of casting inscriptions, the number of lamps that have been successfully verified is still increasing, which undoubtedly increases the competitive sentiment of scrambling.

However, before verification, the new inscription of the lamp needs to go through the following steps, which also represents the general production process of the inscription on Solana:

First, upload a picture on a designated website, write a name, set various transfer rules, and then mint it into an NFT;

Second, prepare some field formats by yourself, such as {“p”:“spl-20”,“op”:“mint”,“tick”:“lamp”,“amt”:“100000”}, and “inscribed” the NFT into the so-called inscription;

Thirdly, in order for an inscription to be valid, it needs to be “verified” to guarantee that it will be able to be traded on the market.

Source: Compiled and produced according to the “SOLS Chain Casting Inscription Tutorial”.

These steps are not friendly, and even somewhat abstract and incomprehensible. You don’t know or interest in how each step is done, all you need to do is get it done faster than anyone else.

Essentially, this is clearly due to the weakness of the infrastructure that leads to the exposure of the development logic, not so much as inscriptions, but as when the programmer is doing various functions in the background.

Due to the first-come-first-served rule, more and more users rushed in to play LAMP, which also made the already unfriendly inscription interface even worse:

Due to the excessive traffic, the three different website pages of casting, inscription and verifying the inscription collapsed one after another, and there were many cases where they could not be accessed or clicked unresponsively. Refreshing the page multiple times doesn’t solve the problem, and it’s up to luck to get the inscription.

At the other end of the spectrum, the number of verified LAMP inscriptions is rising. So on the one hand, there is the impotent rage of repeatedly clicking the mouse because there are too many people, and on the other side, the early worm is lucky to successfully hit the shore.

Finally, after the “rush to grab tickets”, the inscription was typed and the website resumed normal access. At this point, the website won’t remind you that there is no point in continuing to type inscriptions, and you can even complete the inscription without any problems, but the result is a waste of your SOL tokens.

If a set of processes goes down, you will be beaten if you fall behind, and the result is all by luck, the rules may not be sound, and the result is very attractive.

Inscription in front of opportunity, everyone is equal?

Looking back after the competition, whether it is Sols or Lamp, what exactly is the SLP-20 inscription?

In fact, the SPL-20 inscription is a unique Solana address that contains an image stored directly on the blockchain. This concept practically does not differ from the BRC-20 in any way, only now it looks somewhat “atavistic”:

Since it was popular to store all NFT images through a third party for distributed storage, it is now popular to store the images on-chain instead of off-chain.

It is the narrative that says that the on-chain space is precious, and the narrative that fills the on-chain space with garbage pictures is also a narrative, there is no good or bad, only interests.

It’s all about being smart, lucky, and quick to get a piece of the pie in the narrative transition.

In this process, due to the lack of infrastructure such as front-end interfaces, data indexes, prompts, and process encapsulation, early users who come to print inscriptions will have to face an unfriendly operation experience and a stuttering competitive environment.

Currently, SLP-20 inscriptions on Solana are primarily powered by LibrePlex, which is an independent contributor and team in the Solana ecosystem. The above-mentioned inscription engraving and locking website is also from LibrePlex.

It’s just that in the case of the crash caused by the Lamp inscription thermal shock website service, LibrePlex may still have a long way to go to support the inscription business on Solana.

Even Babla, the proposer of the Lamp inscription, posted a post lamenting that Lamp has had a big impact on the inscription ecology on Solana, and it is necessary to update and reconstruct the supporting infrastructure as soon as possible.

But in addition to the emotion, in addition to the creator of the inscription, the website that provides the infrastructure to charge fees, you can ask yourself:

Do you have the time, energy, or even luck to grab the opportunity for a new inscription?

From the author’s experience, under the conflict of weak infrastructure and high competitive pressure, if you want to make inscriptions, you may need enough time to keep an eye on the sudden inscriptions on social media, and pay close attention to the website’s every move while there are problems with the operation after they appear, and repeatedly try boring and repetitive steps.

And even if you try hard enough, there is a chance that you won’t be able to hit because the website crashes, so it will take a little bit of luck.

We often see the idea that when it comes to the crypto market, don’t be biased, can’t be lazy, and have the courage to try. But in the rush of wealth, sometimes even if you let go of your prejudices, work hard enough, and try again, you may get nowhere.

In the face of inscription opportunities, everyone is indeed equal, but individual endowments and energies are not the same, and sometimes it is difficult to have the same frequency as the timing of hot spots.

In the crypto market, you may be competing with VCs when trading tokens, and you may be competing with people who are as as you are when rushing into inscriptions. The former may be cut, the latter may be squeezed.

Therefore, there is no so-called fairness or unfairness, and having the ability to execute, at least in the inscription market, is only a basic quality; in the face of the huge wealth creation effect and FOMO mentality, it is the right choice to reasonably filter the noise and evaluate the possibility of their own operation.

In the end, when the author was surprised to find that the “half” Lamp inscription (due to the website lag and the final verification step) could still be sold on Magic Eden, I had a hunch:

This magical, frenetic and scramble for inscription ticket grabbing game is far from over.