Zerdinals
Zcash inscriptions
The problem Zerdinals solves
The Zcash ecosystem currently lacks a native, trustless way to create, store, and trade digital assets such as artwork, tokens, and on-chain metadata. While many blockchains have vibrant inscription and NFT ecosystems, Zcash has no standardized infrastructure for creators or developers to mint digital assets directly on-chain.
This results in several problems:
No unified standard for on-chain digital assets on Zcash
Developers cannot easily build apps that rely on NFTs, inscriptions, or fungible token primitives.
No accessible tools for creators
Artists, builders, and communities have no platform to mint or showcase digital items using Zcash’s privacy-preserving features.
Missing ecosystem layer for innovation
Without inscriptions, Zcash lacks an important cultural and economic layer that boosts activity, user engagement, and tooling development.
No permissionless tokenization for communities
Projects cannot launch tokens, collectibles, or membership passes natively on the Zcash blockchain.
Zerdinals.com solves this by introducing the first full-featured inscription layer for Zcash, enabling anyone to mint digital art, metadata, and fungible tokens directly on-chain—creating a foundation for builders, creators, and new markets within the Zcash ecosystem.
Challenges I ran into
Building an inscription protocol on Zcash came with several unexpected technical challenges:
- No Taproot Support on Zcash
Zcash does not have Taproot, which is commonly used in other chains (like Bitcoin) for inscriptions.
To overcome this, we engineered a custom approach using P2SH scripts and injected the inscription data into the reveal input. This required designing our own script structure and validation logic from scratch.
- Lack of Developer Documentation
The Zcash ecosystem has very limited developer resources for advanced features like script manipulation, raw transactions, or indexing. We had to rely mostly on reading node source code and experimenting manually to understand how to safely embed and extract inscription data.
- No Mature Libraries for Our Use Case
Existing libraries were incomplete or outdated, especially for:
raw transaction building
script decoding
advanced PSBT workflows
We had to implement many custom utilities to handle signing, encoding, hashing, and script parsing.
- No Suitable Block Parser / Indexer
There was no indexer capable of reading blocks at scale and extracting inscription-specific data.
So we built our own high-performance bulk block parser, capable of scanning the entire chain, detecting inscription events, and indexing them for our marketplace and explorer.
Technologies used