Inscription Estimates

To guarantee the safety of user funds, a watchtower/validator inscribes the state difference to bitcoin as a refundTx to safeguard user funds in case of liveness failure. This ensure the data availability of refund is guaranteed by the bitcoin blocks itself, ie. It uses bitcoin as a data availability layer to commit state difference transaction.

Some points to consider:

  1. Inscription size of RefundTx is largely depended on number of accounts in the system = number of refund outputs.

  2. Every refund output in the refundTx adds ~30vbytes

  3. The size of the compressed refundTx can change based on ratio of compression.

  4. The 4 byte identifier reduces the output size by 26 bytes per address.

  5. Estimated fees in USD changes with BTC price and network fee rate. Calculations below assumes 36 sats/byte for the calculations. BTC/USD price and current fee rate in the network are variable parameters and will change fee in USD numbers.

  6. This document assumes a bull case for Bitcoin. Assumptions may be different for a bear case.

What we don’t consider:

1. Consuming more than half the block space by other L2 projects will create fee pressure in the system, leading to much higher sats/byte

Number of refund Output
Inscription Size (vBytes)
Fee in Sats @
36 sats/byte
Fee in USD 
@ BTC = ~$65,500
Inscription Size (bytes) with 4 byte identifier
Fee in Sats with 4 byte identifier @ 36 sats/byte
Fee in USD with 4 byte identifier @ BTC = ~$65,500
Fees in USD with 4 byte identifier @ BTC = $100,000 , 36 sats/byte
Fees in USD with 4 byte identifier @ BTC = $100,000, 50 sats/byte

1

600

21600

14

585

21060

14

21

29

100

2760

99360

65

2748

98938

53

99

137

250

6015

216540

142

4768

171648

113

171

239

500

12015

432540

284

8970

322920

212

323

448

750

18866

679176

445

13170

474120

311

474

658

1000

24291

874476

572

17370

625320

411

625

868

For ~ 100 bitcoin blocks a day, we assume 100 inscriptions committing a state difference.

Per day cost of inscriptions for 100 inscriptions a day ~ $ 411 * 100 = $41,100

Per month cost if BTC/USD price remains the same = $41,100 *30 = $1,233,000

6 month estimate if price remains the same = $7,398,000

6 month estimate with BTC @ $100k and fee rate @ 36 sats/byte = $11,255,760

6 month estimate if fee rate rises to 50 sats/byte with BTC @100k = $15,633,000

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