Research and development company Delphi Labs and the Astroport Foundation have rolled out an inscription platform for the Cosmos Hub network, called Asteroid.
Inscriptions are a new way to embed data into blockchains without native support for smart contracts. Asteroid uses Cosmos transaction call data to create new tokens called ‘CFT-20s’.
Asteroid contributors released the first CFT-20 token, Asteroids (ROIDS), on Tuesday as a proof of concept. The token – with a total supply of 100 million – was quickly subscribed by users within a few hours. Each ROIDS token is trading at $0.0045, giving it a market cap of $4.5 million.
According to Delphi Labs, Cosmos inscriptions via Asteroid open doors to various applications beyond tokenization and data storage. It also provides a ‘metaprotocol’ framework through which additional apps can be developed.
“The biggest thing people miss about Asteroid is that it was designed as a generalized metaprotocol framework,” said Luke Saunders, CTO of Delphi Labs. “Images and tokens are just the first two use cases, but much more is possible.”
In addition to Asteroid, Delphi Labs supports two other projects – Astroport and Mars Protocol – within the Cosmos ecosystem.
Inscriptions were introduced in early 2023 with the Ordinal protocol, which allows users to inscribe data – such as NFTs and images – onto individual satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain.
In the second half of 2023, the inscriptions quickly expanded to Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chains such as BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Fantom.