Original author: Shenchao TechFlow
Those opportunities that seem to be given away 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 funds poured into the virgin land of the Bitcoin Inscription market, there was also an obvious FOMO effect, and liquidity began to spill over to other ecosystems. If there is no inscription on the new ecology, the market will always follow the same pattern and build a new one; then it will be a game of scrambling to create an inscription.
Since the inscription is relatively fair and there is no pre-mining or VC, for Leeks and retail investors, this is equivalent to a free opportunity to make money.
But the premise is that you have to rush early.
Take the Lamp inscription that suddenly became popular on Solana yesterday as an example. Unlike the previous leading inscription Sols on Solana, where the project party actively called for orders, Lamp was proposed by a Twitter user @babla 11001 without warning, following SPL- 20 format, with a total supply of 210,000 pieces, and a step-by-step tutorial on making inscriptions was released in the form of a long tweet.
And when you are still studying why Lamp suddenly appeared, what the SPL-20 format is, and wondering whether it is air,
The fanatical market only talks about efficiency, not reason.
In just about 3 hours after babla posted, eligible LAMP inscriptions had been quickly completed. LAMP then began trading in Magic Elden and OKXs Web3 wallets. As of press time, the price of a single LAMP inscription reached 0.3 SOL.
A rough estimate is that the cost of inscribing a single LAMP is around 1-2 U. Judging from the current floor price of Lamps, you can make a lot of money as soon as you hit it.
The author discovered Lamp earlier, but failed to successfully hit it. With the multiple benefits of Inscription’s local hotspots and Solana’s capital inflow, the difficulty of competition has also doubled.
Large-scale ticket grabbing scene, if you fall behind you will be beaten
Reviewing the whole process of Lamps inscription yesterday, it felt like going through a Spring Festival travel rush or a concert ticket grab.
But the difference between this feeling is that you dont know exactly what you are grabbing, but you know very well what it means to grab it.
When babla posted a guide on how to make inscriptions on Lamp before I could fully understand it, a Rule Supplement post completely triggered the FOMO mood:
After adding the Lamp inscription, a key verification step is required. Without this step, the inscription cannot be traded in the trading market.
The relevant website shows that there are only 50,000 inscriptions that can be verified, first come, first served, and as you cast the inscriptions, the number of lamps that have been successfully verified is still increasing, which undoubtedly increases the competitive mood. .
However, before verification, the new Lamp inscription still needs to go through the following steps, which also represents the general production process of inscriptions on Solana:
First, upload a picture on a designated website, write a name, set various transfer rules and then mint it into NFT;
Second, prepare some field formats yourself, such as {"p":"spl-20","op":"mint","tick":"lamp","amt":"100000"}, Inscribe the NFT into a so-called inscription;
Third, in order for an inscription to be valid, it needs to be validated to ensure it can be traded on the market.
Picture source: compiled and produced based on Sols Chain Casting Inscription Tutorial
These steps are far from friendly, and are even a bit abstract and confusing. You don’t know and are not interested in how each step is implemented. All you need to do is complete the above steps faster than others.
In essence, this is obviously the exposure of development logic due to the weakness of the infrastructure. Rather than writing inscriptions, it is more like programmers doing various functional configuration operations in the background.
Due to the first-verify-first-served rule, more and more users rush in to LAMP, which makes the already unfriendly inscription interface even worse:
Due to excessive traffic, three different website pages for casting, engraving, and verifying inscriptions crashed one after another, and many times became inaccessible or unresponsive to clicks. Refreshing the page multiple times does not solve the problem. Whether you can get the inscription depends on luck.
On the other side, the number of verified LAMP inscriptions is still rising. So on one side was the incompetent rage who was stuck clicking the mouse repeatedly because there were too many people, and on the other side was the bug who got up early and was lucky enough to successfully finish the fight and land.
Finally, after the peak rush for tickets, the inscription was completed and normal access to the website resumed. At this time, the website will not remind you that there is no point in continuing to make inscriptions. You can even complete the action of making inscriptions smoothly, but the result is a waste of your SOL tokens.
If you follow a set of procedures, you will be beaten if you fall behind. The result depends entirely on luck. The rules may not be perfect, but the results are very tempting.
In the face of inscription opportunities, everyone is equal?
Looking back after the competition is over, whether it is Sols or Lamp, what exactly is the inscription on SLP-20?
In fact, the SPL-20 inscription is a unique Solana address containing the image stored directly on the blockchain. This concept is actually no different from BRC-20, but now it looks a bit atavistic:
Since the popular method before was to store all NFT images in a distributed manner through a third party, it is now popular to store images on the chain instead of off-chain.
To say that the space on the chain is precious is a narrative, and to fill the space on the chain with junk pictures is also a narrative. There is no good or bad, only benefits.
The key is whether you can be smart, lucky, and quick to get your share of 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 came to inscribe will have to face an unfriendly operating experience and a laggy competitive environment.
Currently, the SLP-20 inscriptions on Solana are mainly composed ofLibrePlexProvide support as an independent contributor and team in the Solana ecosystem. The inscribed and locked sites mentioned above also come from LibrePlex.
Judging from the crash caused by Lamps inscription thermal shock to the website service, LibrePlex probably still has a long way to go to optimize if it wants to support the inscription business on Solana.
Even Babla, the proposer of the Lamp inscription, expressed in a post 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 besides sighing, in addition to the creators of the inscriptions and the websites that charge fees for providing infrastructure, you can ask yourself:
Do you have the time, energy or even luck to seize the opportunity of a new inscription?
From the author’s experience, under the conflict between weak infrastructure and high competitive pressure, if you want to make inscriptions, you may need sufficient time to keep an eye on the sudden appearance of inscriptions on social media, and there may be problems with the operation after they appear. At the same time, pay close attention to every move of the website and try boring and repetitive steps over and over again.
And even if you work hard enough, you may not be able to win because the website crashes, so you still need a little luck.
We often see a view that when dealing with the encryption market, you should not be biased or lazy, but have the courage to try. But in the rush of wealth, sometimes even if you put aside your prejudices, be diligent enough, and try everything, you may still get nothing.
In the face of inscription opportunities, everyone is indeed equal; but individual talents and energy are not the same, and sometimes it is difficult to be in sync with the timing of hot spots.
In the crypto market, trading tokens, you might be competing with VCs; jumping into Inscription, you might be competing with people who are just as hungry as you are. The former may be cut, the latter may be squeezed.
Therefore, there is no so-called fairness or unfairness. The ability to execute, at least in the inscription market, is just a basic quality. When faced with the huge wealth creation effect and FOMO mentality, it is correct to filter the noise reasonably and evaluate the possibility of ones own operations. s Choice.
Finally, the Lamp inscription was finished. When I was surprised to find that the half Lamp inscription I typed (because the website was stuck and could not complete the final verification step) could actually be sold at a price on Magic Eden, I had a hunch:
This magical, fanatical and scrambling game of grabbing tickets for inscriptions is far from over.
