Will PING spark another "inscription craze" again?

Author: Haotian

Everyone says the emergence of $PING resembles the 2023 BTC inscription craze—why is it similar, and in what ways? Will it evolve like the inscription market? Short answer: yes. Here's the detailed logic:

1) Why is it similar? The core lies in on-chain valid data + off-chain interpretation rights.

The mechanics of inscriptions work like this: users send transactions on the Bitcoin mainnet to occupy specific UTXOs, but the Bitcoin network itself has no ability to determine which transaction is valid. The Ordinals protocol acts as the indexer—the third-party referee—that scans all on-chain transactions and applies its own rules (e.g., "First is First") to decide which inscriptions are valid and authentic.

PING operates on nearly the same formula: users send USDC on Base to a specific address dynamically returned by x402scan, effectively sending a "payment request" to the x402 protocol. However, neither the Base chain nor the x402 protocol itself recognizes this as minting $PING—in their eyes, it's just an ordinary ERC20 transfer.

What actually gives this transaction the meaning of "minting" is the x402scan indexer: it scans all USDC transfers on Base sent to designated addresses, applies its own rule (1 USDC = 5000 $PING), identifies which transactions qualify as "valid mints," records them in an off-chain database, and distributes tokens via smart contracts.

2) Where is the similarity? When inscriptions first emerged, they were resisted by the Bitcoin Core team because they only cluttered the Bitcoin mainnet with spam transactions and seemed to offer no value. Clearly, by this logic, $PING’s existence follows a similar pattern. But just as the Bitcoin mainnet couldn't stop inscriptions despite disapproval, the open-standard x402 protocol is powerless to prevent such use, even if undesirable in the short term.

The principle is simple: when people mint inscriptions, their assets at least remain on the Bitcoin mainnet; if the hype dies down, they can reclaim some BTC. But for PING minting, all funds actually go into a treasury wallet designated by x402scan. The team is simultaneously crowdfunding and issuing tokens, while the actual x402 protocol is merely being exploited for free on both ends.

Don’t rush to attack me—this behavior, as I said earlier, is akin to sounding a "charge order." It greatly benefits the exposure and propagation of the x402 ecosystem. It forcibly creates a use case for the x402 protocol with immediate effect, serving as a stress test and undoubtedly marking a "narrative singularity" for x402—one that could catalyze improvements and ecological growth.

3) Will it evolve like the inscription market? Yes. As previously stated, the significance of $PING ultimately rests on the x402scan indexer. Yet it clearly has major flaws: for instance, assets are held under a centralized entity, contradicting the original intent of the x402 protocol—to create payment channels for AI Agents. It may not seamlessly interoperate with other x402 implementations, and lacks unified standards for minting, transferring, burning, and other operations.

Therefore, following the evolutionary path of BRC20 → ARC20 → SRC20 → Runes, we can expect many new "inscriptions" claiming to be more "orthodox" to emerge.

Ideas such as improving custody models, changing the method of minting via transactions, or gaining native protocol support will likely appear. To exaggerate slightly, even if x402scan were to disappear or the treasury run away with funds, nothing could stop this trend now—the Pandora’s box has already been opened!

That’s all.

Let me reiterate one view: the explosion of the x402 narrative is inevitable. $PING is merely the starting signal. How the market evolves from here could take many forms. The above is shared purely as conceptual logic, not investment advice. But there’s no need to panic—what comes next is definitely worth joining in.