Stache

How does SPL-20 work under-the-hood? Here's a "quick" crash course. An inscription is a PDA associated with an NFT. It's similar to the token metadata account, except it stores arbitrary binary data in an array. Due to transaction size limits, the array might need to be populated over multiple transactions. The result is that you can store arbitrary metadata up to 10MB. You can use this to store images or serialized JSON metadata. Note that you can inscribing an NFT does not make it an SPL-20 token. They are different things. SPL-20 uses Solana tokens, plus inscriptions, to mimic Bitcoin's BRC-20. It's defined via JSONs. The following JSON defines a helius token with a supply of 1000: Note the "op" is "deploy". For Solana folks, this is akin to your mint account. When you mint SPL-20 tokens you produce a new JSON. In this example, we mint one "helius" token: With SPL-20, each operation you take is an NFT mint. The JSON is then inscribed into the NFT. Similar to ordinals, every single operation (mint) is associated with an order number. Here's an example for the "helius" token deployment: libreplex.io/scanner?mintId=… Nothing prevents someone from minting an invalid SPL-20 token. If the supply for Helius is 1000, and you mint 1 token after someone else has minted 1000, your SPL20 token is invalid. The ordering is determined via the inscription order. To simplify this, Libreplex created validators. Validators are tools that allow you to check if an SPL-20 token is valid. Here's an example of me validating my "helius" token against the "lads" deployment. It fails to validate, as expected. Please be careful when playing around with SPL-20 tokens. Validity is very specific and arbitrary. You can easily get rugged or make a mistake on your part. If you want to play and make your own SPL-20 tokens, I recommend trying the tool at solscribe.io/ by @LaunchMyNFT.