Ethscriptions are an alternative to smart contracts—which are prohibitively expensive for most users—and to L2s, which today are centralized.

Ethscriptions is a protocol that allows users to share information and perform computations on Ethereum L1 at a drastically lower cost.Ethscriptions achieves this by bypassing smart contract storage and execution and instead calculating state by applying deterministic protocol rules to "dumb" Ethereum calldata.

The goal of Ethscriptions is to give ordinary users the ability to perform decentralized computations for a reasonable price. Ethscriptions primarily function as cheaper NFTs. Ethscriptions are cheaper because they store data on-chain using Ethereum transaction calldata, not smart contracts.