Solana Inscription Market A frenzy-inducing ticket-grabbing game with everyone racing to get ahead.

Solana Inscription Market A Thrilling Ticket-Grabbing Game Driven by Frenzy and Competition

Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

“The opportunities that seem to be handed to you often come with great difficulties.”

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

After funds poured into the virgin land of the Bitcoin inscription market, there was an obvious FOMO effect, and liquidity began to overflow into other ecosystems. If there are no inscriptions in the new ecosystem, the market will always create new ones; then there will be a race to participate in the inscription game.

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Since inscription participation is relatively fair and there is no pre-mining or VC involvement, it is like a free opportunity to grab money for retail investors.

But the prerequisite is that you have to act quickly.

Take the sudden rise of Lamp inscription on Solana yesterday as an example. Unlike the previous leading inscription on Solana, Sols, which had active project endorsements, Lamp was proposed by a Twitter user @babla11001 without any warning. It follows the SPL-20 format, has a total supply of 210,000, and the steps for inscription were released in the form of a long tweet.

And while you were still trying to figure out how Lamp suddenly appeared, what the SPL-20 format was, and whether it was real or just hot air,

the frenzied market only cares about efficiency, not reason.

In about 3 hours after babla posted, the qualifying LAMP inscriptions were quickly sold out. Subsequently, LAMP started trading in Magic Elden and OKX Web3 wallets. At the time of writing, the price of a single LAMP inscription reached 0.3 SOL.

A rough estimate puts the cost of inscription for a single LAMP at around 1-2 U, considering the current floor price of Lamp, you would make a quick profit if you managed to participate.

I discovered Lamp at an earlier time, but I did not succeed in participating. With the multiple benefits of the inscription being a hot spot and funds flowing into Solana, the competition became even more difficult.

A large-scale ticket-grabbing scene, lagging behind leads to being beaten

Reviewing the entire process of inscription participation for Lamp yesterday feels like going through the rush hour of Spring Festival travel or ticket-grabbing at a concert.

But the difference in this feeling is that you don’t actually know what you’re fighting for, you just know that if you win, it means something.

When babla’s guide on how to participate in the inscription for Lamp was not fully understood, a “rule supplement” post completely ignited FOMO emotions:

“After engraving the Lamp inscription, there is still a crucial verification step. Without this step, the inscription cannot be traded in the marketplace.”

According to related websites, there are only 50,000 verifiable inscriptions available, and it’s first come, first served. As you forge your inscription, the number of successfully verified Lamps keeps increasing, which undoubtedly adds to the sense of competition and urgency.

But before the verification, the initial offering of Lamp inscriptions on Solana requires several steps that represent the general production process:

First, upload an image on a designated website, write a name, set various transfer rules, and mint it as an NFT;

Second, prepare certain field formats, such as {“p”:”spl-20″,”op”:”mint”,”tick”:”lamp”,”amt”:”100000″}, and “inscribe” (Inscribed) the NFT, transforming it into what is known as an inscription;

Third, in order for the inscription to be valid, it needs to be “verified” to ensure it can be traded in the marketplace.

Image source: Compiled and produced based on the "Sols Chain Inscription Production Tutorial"

These steps are not exactly user-friendly, and they may seem abstract and puzzling. You don’t need to know or be interested in the specific implementation of each step; what you need to do is complete the above steps faster than others.

Essentially, this is clearly a result of the exposed development logic due to the frailty of the infrastructure. Rather than calling it “engraving inscriptions,” it is more like programmers are operating various functional configurations behind the scenes.

Due to the rule of first-come, first-served for verification, the increasing number of users rushing in to engrave LAMP inscriptions has made the already unfriendly inscription interface even worse:

Due to the high traffic, the three different website pages for forging, inscribing, and verifying inscriptions have crashed one after another, resulting in multiple instances of unavailability or unresponsiveness when clicking. Refreshing the pages multiple times doesn’t solve the problem, and getting an inscription depends solely on luck.

On the other side, the number of verified LAMP inscriptions continues to rise. So on one hand, there is the futile fury of clicking the mouse repeatedly because of too many people getting stuck, and on the other hand, there is the lucky success of the early worms who managed to finish and get ashore.

Finally, after the “peak ticket grabbing period,” the inscriptions were finished and the website returned to normal access. At this point, the website does not even remind you that continuing to inscribe is meaningless, and you can still smoothly complete the action of inscribing, but the result is a waste of your SOL tokens.

After going through the whole process, falling behind leads to being beaten, and the result depends entirely on luck. The rules may not be sound, but the result is very tempting.

In the face of inscription opportunities, is everyone equal?

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

In fact, SPL-20 inscription is the only Solana address that contains images directly stored on the blockchain. This concept is actually no different from BRC-20, it’s just seen as a bit “backward” now:

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

It is a narrative to say that on-chain space is precious, and it is also a narrative to fill the on-chain space with junk images. There is no right or wrong, only interests.

The key is whether you can be smart, lucky, and quick in the transition of narratives to get a piece of the pie.

However, in this process, due to the lack of infrastructure such as frontend interfaces, data indexing, hints, and process encapsulation, early users who come to inscribe will have to face unfriendly operating experiences and a competitive environment with lag.

Currently, the SLP-20 inscriptions on Solana are mainly supported by LibrePlex, an independent contributor and team in the Solana ecosystem. The website mentioned earlier for inscribing and locking the inscriptions also comes from LibrePlex.

However, judging from the situation where the surge in Lamp inscriptions crashed the website services, it seems that LibrePlex still has a long way to go in optimizing its support for inscription business on Solana.

Even Babla, the proposer of Lamp inscriptions, posted his own reflections, stating that Lamp has had a significant impact on the inscription ecosystem on Solana, and it is necessary to update and rebuild the supporting infrastructure as soon as possible.

But beyond the sentiment, besides the creators of the inscription, the websites that charge transaction fees for providing infrastructure, can ask themselves:

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

From my experience, in the conflict between weak infrastructure and high competition pressure, if you want to play the inscription game, you may need ample time to keep an eye on the sudden appearance of inscriptions on social media and closely monitor the actions of the website, while repeatedly attempting dull and repetitive steps.

And even if you work hard enough, there is a possibility you may not be able to get one because the website crashes, so a little luck is still required.

We often hear a viewpoint that, when dealing with the crypto market, do not have biases, cannot be lazy, and must be willing to try. But in the frenzy of wealth, sometimes even if you let go of biases, work hard enough and try everything, you may still end up with nothing.

When facing the opportunity of inscriptions, it is true that everyone is equal, but individual endowments and energy levels are not the same, making it difficult to align with the timing of the hotspots.

In the crypto market, when trading tokens, you may be competing with venture capitalists; when diving into inscriptions, you may be competing with people who are as hungry as you. The former may be cut, and the latter may be squeezed.

Therefore, there is no such thing as fairness or unfairness. Having the ability to execute is at least the basic qualification in the inscription market. When facing the tremendous wealth effect and FOMO mentality, reasonable filtering of noise and evaluation of one’s own operational possibilities is the right choice.

Lastly, after finishing the inscription Lamp, when I was amazed to find out that the “half” inscription I completed (due to website lagging, unable to complete the final verification step) can still be sold on Magic Eden, there is a sense of anticipation:

This magical, frenzied, and fierce inscription ticket-grabbing game is far from over.

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