Ordinals family
Everything in this family is built on Ordinals inscriptions: content written into the witness of a Bitcoin transaction and tracked to a particular satoshi.
| Protocol | Chain | Creation operations | Released | Workspace |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitmapbitmaps | Bitcoin | transfer | Read-only in Inscribe | None |
| BLOCK-20block-20 | Bitcoin | deployminttransfer | Released | /block20 |
| BRC-20brc-20 | Bitcoin | deployminttransfer | Released, ungated | /brc20 |
| Ordinalsordinal, inscriptions, inscription | Bitcoin | inscribetransfer | Released, ungated | /inscribe |
| TAPtap-protocol | Bitcoin | deployminttransfer | Released, ungated | /tap |
| UNATtap-unat, tap_unat | Bitcoin | transfer | Read-only in Inscribe | None |
Ordinals
Section titled “Ordinals”The base layer for the rest. An inscription is content on a satoshi, and that satoshi lives in an output of its own.
The Inscribe workspace at /inscribe has eight sub-tabs: Text, Files, Names,
Parent/Child, Delegate, Gallery, Stamps and Data Lab. Ord Studio at /ord-studio gives
full inscription-envelope control, with a live HTML sandbox, templates, and the ord
specification fields including pointer, parent, metadata, gzip and metaprotocol.
Start with your first inscription, then inscribe a file and create a collection.
BRC-20
Section titled “BRC-20”Tokens defined by JSON text inscriptions. Deploy fixes the ticker, supply and per-mint limit; mint claims an amount; transfer moves a balance.
Inscribe supports 4-byte tickers, 5-byte self-issuance, and brc2.0.
Workspace: /brc20. Released and ungated.
Tokens with a two-step transfer. A TAP transfer is an inscription authorising the move, then the move itself, so a transfer that stops halfway has not moved anything.
The TAP workspace also mints DMT tokens, which claim block numbers, and carries an airdrop, a private mint and a blockpad.
Workspace: /tap. Released and ungated.
BLOCK-20
Section titled “BLOCK-20”Deploy, mint and transfer, with one distinctive rule: every mint embeds the latest block hash, filled in at mint time rather than by you. That ties each mint to the chain state it was made against.
Workspace: /block20. Released.
Bitmap and UNAT
Section titled “Bitmap and UNAT”Both are recorded in the protocol registry as transferable, and neither has a creation or transfer workspace in Inscribe.
What they do have is recognition. Both appear in:
- your Portfolio, classified by protocol;
- inscription search;
- the asset inventory for an output, so the safety screening knows an output carrying one is not plain bitcoin.
That last point is the useful one: Inscribe will not spend a Bitmap or UNAT output to pay a fee, even though it cannot create or move one for you.
To transfer either, use a tool that supports it.