Inscription Payload vs Envelope
Daily average inscription payload vs envelope overhead per block
Short ranges plot one point per block, about one every ten minutes. Longer ranges plot one point per day, computed from every block in that day. How it is computed depends on the chart: some average, some total the day up, some are a ratio of the day's sums, and each chart says which. Either way a brief spike inside a day is smoothed away.
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About this metric
Definition
An inscription is content wrapped in a small protocol structure: markers saying what follows, the content type, and a terminator. This splits the two, so the cost of the wrapper is visible next to the thing being stored. Small inscriptions pay proportionally far more wrapper.
How it is measured
Every Ordinals inscription wraps content in a witness envelope: OP_FALSE OP_IF ... OP_ENDIF with push opcodes and the 'ord' marker. The split is estimated, not parsed: the envelope header, content-type section and terminator are located by pattern and subtracted, and anything not found falls back to 10 bytes. Measured across the more than 190,000 blocks holding a detection, that overhead is 7.7% of all matching witness bytes, while the median block puts it at 17.9% and individual blocks run from nothing to 94%. The share is high where inscriptions are small, since the envelope cost is close to fixed, which is why BRC-20 JSON operations sit at the top of that range.
Measured from my own Bitcoin node. Methodology