My guest today is Tom S. Lehman, who goes by Middlemarch on Twitter. Tom is the creator of Ethscriptions, an NFT standard for inscribing base64 encoded URIs in the data field of EVM transactions. Prior to Ethscriptions, Tom was co-founder and CEO of popular lyrics site and content company Genius.

Ethscriptions are inspired both by Bitcion Inscriptions and the Ethereum practice of appending hex encoded UTF-8 strings to the data field of regular transactions, a gesture that has been used by hackers and artists to communicate onchain.

The best way to think of Ethscriptions is as an alternative to smart contracts. Instead of executing and verifying logic onchain inside of a function call in an EVM smart contract, Ethscriptions leave the validation of minting and transfer events to offchain indexers, which can follow the protocol's standard to decide whether transactions mutated Ethscription state. Instead of reverting invalid transactions when they're sent, Ethscriptions indexers ignore them, despite their successful inclusion in the chain. This makes Ethscriptions a more Bitcoin-style protocol experiment, where a new software reads new meaning into data stored using existing rudimentary blockchain affordances.

At the same time, Ethscriptions is an artistic meditation that questions the presumed legitimacy of L2s and NFT standards like ERC-721, which both make certain assumptions about how meaning should be stored and computed on Ethereum and other EVMs.

It was fantastic talking with Tom who is an energetic builder and independent thinker. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

Ethscriptions.com

The infamous

TechCrunch Disrupt appearance (2013)