Ordinal Inscription Guide
Individual gros can be inscribed with arbitrary content, creating Groestlcoin-native digital artifacts that can be held in a Groestlcoin wallet and transferred using Groestlcoin transactions. Inscriptions are as durable, immutable, secure, and decentralized as Groestlcoin itself.
Working with inscriptions requires a Groestlcoin full node, to give you a view of the current state of the Groestlcoin blockchain, and a wallet that can create inscriptions and perform gro control when constructing transactions to send inscriptions to another wallet.
Groestlcoin Core provides both a Groestlcoin full node and wallet. However, the Groestlcoin Core wallet cannot create inscriptions and does not perform gro control.
This requires ord
, the ordinal utility. ord
doesn't implement its own wallet, so ord wallet
subcommands interact with
Groestlcoin Core wallets.
This guide covers:
- Installing Groestlcoin Core
- Syncing the Groestlcoin blockchain
- Creating a Groestlcoin Core wallet
- Using
ord wallet receive
to receive gros - Creating inscriptions with
ord wallet inscribe
- Sending inscriptions with
ord wallet send
- Receiving inscriptions with
ord wallet receive
Getting Help
If you get stuck, try asking for help on the Groestlcoin Discord Server, or checking GitHub for relevant issues.
Installing Groestlcoin Core
Groestlcoin Core is available from groestlcoin.org.
Making inscriptions requires Groestlcoin Core 24 or newer.
This guide does not cover installing Groestlcoin Core in detail. Once Groestlcoin Core
is installed, you should be able to run groestlcoind -version
successfully from
the command line. Do NOT use groestlcoin-qt
.
Configuring Groestlcoin Core
ord
requires Groestlcoin Core's transaction index and rest interface.
To configure your Groestlcoin Core node to maintain a transaction
index, add the following to your groestlcoin.conf
:
txindex=1
Or, run groestlcoind
with -txindex
:
groestlcoind -txindex
Details on creating or modifying your groestlcoin.conf
file can be found
here.
Syncing the Groestlcoin Blockchain
To sync the chain, run:
groestlcoind -txindex
…and leave it running until getblockcount
:
groestlcoin-cli getblockcount
agrees with the block count on a block explorer like the mempool.space block
explorer. ord
interacts with groestlcoind
, so you
should leave groestlcoind
running in the background when you're using ord
.
The blockchain takes about 600GB of disk space. If you have an external drive
you want to store blocks on, use the configuration option
blocksdir=<external_drive_path>
. This is much simpler than using the
datadir
option because the cookie file will still be in the default location
for groestlcoin-cli
and ord
to find.
Troubleshooting
Make sure you can access groestlcoind
with groestlcoin-cli -getinfo
and that it is
fully synced.
If groestlcoin-cli -getinfo
returns Could not connect to the server
, groestlcoind
is not running.
Make sure rpcuser
, rpcpassword
, or rpcauth
are NOT set in your
groestlcoin.conf
file. ord
requires using cookie authentication. Make sure there
is a file .cookie
in your groestlcoin data directory.
If groestlcoin-cli -getinfo
returns Could not locate RPC credentials
, then you
must specify the cookie file location.
If you are using a custom data directory (specifying the datadir
option),
then you must specify the cookie location like
groestlcoin-cli -rpccookiefile=<your_groestlcoin_datadir>/.cookie -getinfo
.
When running ord
you must specify the cookie file location with
--cookie-file=<your_groestlcoin_datadir>/.cookie
.
Make sure you do NOT have disablewallet=1
in your groestlcoin.conf
file. If
groestlcoin-cli listwallets
returns Method not found
then the wallet is disabled
and you won't be able to use ord
.
Make sure txindex=1
is set. Run groestlcoin-cli getindexinfo
and it should
return something like
{
"txindex": {
"synced": true,
"best_block_height": 776546
}
}
If it only returns {}
, txindex
is not set.
If it returns "synced": false
, groestlcoind
is still creating the txindex
.
Wait until "synced": true
before using ord
.
If you have maxuploadtarget
set it can interfere with fetching blocks for
ord
index. Either remove it or set whitebind=127.0.0.1:1331
.
Installing ord
The ord
utility is written in Rust and can be built from
source. Pre-built binaries are available on the
releases page.
You can install the latest pre-built binary from the command line with:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsLS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Groestlcoin/ord-groestlcoin/master/install.sh | bash -s
Once ord
is installed, you should be able to run:
ord --version
Which prints out ord
's version number.
Creating a Groestlcoin Core Wallet
ord
uses Groestlcoin Core to manage private keys, sign transactions, and
broadcast transactions to the Groestlcoin network.
To create a Groestlcoin Core wallet named ord
for use with ord
, run:
ord wallet create
Receiving Gros
Inscriptions are made on individual gros, using normal Groestlcoin transactions that pay fees in gros, so your wallet will need some gros.
Get a new address from your ord
wallet by running:
ord wallet receive
And send it some funds.
You can see pending transactions with:
ord wallet transactions
Once the transaction confirms, you should be able to see the transactions
outputs with ord wallet outputs
.
Creating Inscription Content
Gros can be inscribed with any kind of content, but the ord
wallet only
supports content types that can be displayed by the ord
block explorer.
Additionally, inscriptions are included in transactions, so the larger the content, the higher the fee that the inscription transaction must pay.
Inscription content is included in transaction witnesses, which receive the witness discount. To calculate the approximate fee that an inscribe transaction will pay, divide the content size by four and multiply by the fee rate.
Inscription transactions must be less than 400,000 weight units, or they will not be relayed by Groestlcoin Core. One byte of inscription content costs one weight unit. Since an inscription transaction includes not just the inscription content, limit inscription content to less than 400,000 weight units. 390,000 weight units should be safe.
Creating Inscriptions
To create an inscription with the contents of FILE
, run:
ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate FEE_RATE FILE
Ord will output two transactions IDs, one for the commit transaction, and one
for the reveal transaction, and the inscription ID. Inscription IDs are of the
form TXIDiN
, where TXID
is the transaction ID of the reveal transaction,
and N
is the index of the inscription in the reveal transaction.
The commit transaction commits to a tapscript containing the content of the inscription, and the reveal transaction spends from that tapscript, revealing the content on chain and inscribing it on the first gro of the input that contains the corresponding tapscript.
Wait for the reveal transaction to be mined. You can check the status of the commit and reveal transactions using the esplora block explorer.
Once the reveal transaction has been mined, the inscription ID should be printed when you run:
ord wallet inscriptions
Parent-Child Inscriptions
Parent-child inscriptions enable what is colloquially known as collections, see provenance for more information.
To make an inscription a child of another, the parent inscription has to be
inscribed and present in the wallet. To choose a parent run ord wallet inscriptions
and copy the inscription id (<PARENT_INSCRIPTION_ID>
).
Now inscribe the child inscription and specify the parent like so:
ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate FEE_RATE --parent <PARENT_INSCRIPTION_ID> CHILD_FILE
This relationship cannot be added retroactively, the parent has to be present at inception of the child.
Sending Inscriptions
Ask the recipient to generate a new address by running:
ord wallet receive
Send the inscription by running:
ord wallet send --fee-rate <FEE_RATE> <ADDRESS> <INSCRIPTION_ID>
See the pending transaction with:
ord wallet transactions
Once the send transaction confirms, the recipient can confirm receipt by running:
ord wallet inscriptions
Receiving Inscriptions
Generate a new receive address using:
ord wallet receive
The sender can transfer the inscription to your address using:
ord wallet send ADDRESS INSCRIPTION_ID
See the pending transaction with:
ord wallet transactions
Once the send transaction confirms, you can can confirm receipt by running:
ord wallet inscriptions