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Safety in sixty seconds

You will get from this page: the single most common way these assets are destroyed, and how to make it impossible for you. Read this before holding or moving anything.

  1. Keep artifact addresses separate from spending addresses. Give assets their own address and never send ordinary payments from it.
  2. Never spend from those keys with a wallet that is not inscription-aware, including a general-purpose mobile wallet that happens to hold the same seed.

The ZordiScan page for an address lists every inscription, ZRune balance, and ZRC-20 balance it holds, against the specific output that carries each one. Search the address at zrunes.io before moving anything.

Two things that surprise people:

  • One output can carry many assets. Outputs holding hundreds of inscriptions exist on mainnet. An output is spent whole, so spending it moves everything on it at once. Details.
  • Shielding is not storage. Spending an asset-bearing output entirely into a shielded pool ends tracking permanently for a Zerdinal and burns a ZRune balance by protocol rule. Unshielding later does not undo either. Details.

The indexer behind the product publishes a per-output verdict on whether an output carries an asset, and Universe Wallet consults it before spending. While any part of the chain is unread, an output with nothing recorded against it is reported as unchecked, not as clear, because an output created in an unread block is indistinguishable from one that never carried anything. A wallet that consults the verdict cannot be told an unknown output is safe.

An inscription is written by whoever paid the fee. Most of it is an image or a record, but some of it is HTML, which is a program.

The product never runs one by itself. A gallery shows a typed card and nothing more; a document only runs when you ask for it on its own page, and then it runs inside a frame that has an origin of its own. It cannot read the page around it, cannot reach your wallet, cannot reach the network, and cannot open a window, submit a form, or start a download. What you see is the bytes exactly as they were inscribed: they are not rewritten or cleaned up, because they are the artifact. What is contained is what they are allowed to reach.

Zerdinals and ZRunes use transparent Zcash transactions. Content, addresses, balances, and activity are publicly visible, forever. Nothing in this product makes on-chain activity private. If you need financial privacy on Zcash, use shielded ZEC in a shielded wallet, and keep that activity separate from your artifact activity.