What are Recursive Inscriptions?

You've most likely heard about it several times and it's also not a new innovation from the past few weeks. But do you actually know what it means and does?

For anyone who doesn't know, I explain it in this article.

Key points:

- What are Recursive Inscriptions?
- What does it do?
- Example

Recursive Inscriptions

It can be quite costly to launch your artwork on the Bitcoin blockchain. For many projects, that meant they needed to optimize their artwork to the smallest file size possible.

Recursive inscriptions elevate ordinal inscriptions to a higher realm, presenting a potentially revolutionary approach for extending the Bitcoin NFT network.

Ordinals have the capacity to hold up to 4MB of data directly within the Bitcoin blockchain. Nevertheless, through recursive inscriptions, developers have the opportunity to establish an intricate network of interlinked data repositories, effectively transcending the restrictive 4MB constraint.

You simply inscribe each trait in the collection in its original format (lossless optimization is still recommended), and then you can use recursion to generate HTML files that pull in these traits and rebuild the artwork.

The end result is a collection of HTML files that “look” exactly like the final image in every way at only a fraction of the file size, in most cases under 1kb. (Source: Ordinalsbot.medium)

Example

Below is an example described by Ordinalsbot. This perfectly illustrates how a recursive inscription works.

The example below shows 4 different traits. These should normally form as one. But if you do it that way it will have a larger file size which will make the inscription cost much more.

Therefore, it is divided into 4 different traits. This causes the file size to decrease significantly.

Now the recursion method comes in handy. The software can make sure that these 4 traits are merged (on-chain) into 1 image.

It is even merged so that when you want to copy the image you copy one image and not all the traits separately.

In case you want to know more about the code Ordinalsbot used, you can read it here: https://ordinalsbot.medium.com/recursive-inscriptions-creating-a-collection-from-shared-layers-b43a628144e8