Glossary

Terms as Inscribe uses them. Where a word means something narrower here than in general usage, the narrower sense is the one given.

Addresses and wallets

Payment address: The address holding your spendable bitcoin. It funds orders and pays network fees. Often starts bc1q or 3.

Ordinals address: The Taproot address holding your inscriptions, rune balances and token balances. Starts bc1p on mainnet. Its satoshis are carrying assets and are not spendable money.

Commit address: A one-time address generated for a single order. You pay it once; the order key spends it.

Destination address: Where an asset is being sent. Named on the confirmation screen so you can check it.

Money

Network fee: What miners are paid. Your fee rate times the transaction size. A fee.

Service fee: A flat 1,500 satoshis for most actions, charged once per order. A fee. Fee-bumping and asset recovery charge nothing.

Inscription output, also Mint UTXO Value on screen: The satoshi your inscription sits on, plus its padding. Not a fee. It stays yours. Defaults to 546 satoshis.

sat/vB: Satoshis per virtual byte, the unit a fee rate is quoted in.

Dust threshold: The smallest output value the network will relay, which depends on the address type. 294 for P2WPKH, 330 for P2WSH and Taproot, 546 used as a safe fallback.

Padding: The satoshis in an inscription output beyond what the inscription strictly needs. Some can be reclaimed with Asset Recovery.

Transactions

UTXO, unspent transaction output: A discrete parcel of bitcoin. Bitcoin spends an output whole, which is the reason asset safety exists at all.

Commit transaction: The first of the two transactions. Yours: your wallet builds and signs it. It funds the commit address.

Reveal transaction: The second. It spends the commit output and carries your content onto the chain. Signed by the order own key, which is why you sign only once.

RBF, replace-by-fee: Broadcasting a replacement of a stuck transaction at a higher fee rate. Only possible if the original signalled that it could be replaced.

CPFP, child-pays-for-parent: Spending an output of a stuck transaction at a rate high enough that mining both becomes worthwhile. The route when RBF is not available.

Assets

Inscription: Content written into the witness of a Bitcoin transaction and tracked to a particular satoshi.

Parent and child: An inscription made under a parent inscription you own, so its membership of a collection is provable from the chain. Requires a second signature.

Delegate: An inscription pointing at another inscription content, so the bytes are stored once.

Etch: The Runes word for bringing a new rune into existence. What other protocols call a deploy.

Deploy: Creating a new token and fixing its ticker, supply and per-mint limit.

Mint: Claiming an amount of a token or rune that already exists.

Classification and safety

Assets detected: An index positively reported an asset on this output. Never spent automatically.

No known risk: A complete, untruncated, sourced and dated scan classified this output as plain bitcoin. Spent first.

Unverified: The scan did not complete, was truncated, or could not answer. Still spendable, ranked after cleared outputs. Unknown is not the same as safe.

Unclassified: An asset the inventory recognises as present but cannot place into a protocol category. Shown rather than dropped.

Data states

Live: The source is answering and current with the chain.

Live, currency unverified: Answering, but reports no height, so currency cannot be checked.

Tip not verified: Answering with a height, but the chain tip could not be read for comparison.

Behind: Answering with a height that trails the chain tip.

Unavailable: Not answering. Never presented as an authoritative empty result.

Partial: The portfolio header when at least one source did not answer.

Release states

Released, ungated: Available, and covered by the release health and smoke checks.

Released: Available in principle. A deployment decides whether to switch it on.

Not released: Unfinished work present in the codebase. Do not rely on it.

Read-only in Inscribe: The protocol is recognised in your portfolio and in asset screening, but there is no workspace for creating it.

Order states

Awaiting payment: Quoted, waiting for the commit address to be funded.

Creation in progress: Payment seen. Covers broadcast, confirmation and indexing.

Wallet visible: The indexer and your wallet agree the asset exists. Done.

Failed: Needs attention. See recovery routes.