How an inscription sale is found and priced
0.9.53Inscription sales are found in confirmed blocks by a marketplace listing's signature, priced from the seller's payment output, and matched to the inscription.
In one sentence
An inscription sale is a confirmed transaction with a signed listing in it; the price is the payment output paired with that listing, and the item is worked out from where its sats went.
As of 2026-10-21, 44 collections had at least 3 clean sales each in the last 30 days.
Where the data comes from
Our own Bitcoin Core node, plus our own ord index once it has caught up with the chain. No marketplace feed.
What counts as a sale
- The transaction has at least two inputs and an input signed
SIGHASH_SINGLE|ANYONECANPAY, the signature a marketplace listing is made with. - It carries no Runestone (rune sales are handled separately, see rune sales).
- Each such input is paired with the output at the same position: that output is the seller's payment, and its value is the price.
- The listed coin's value is the postage. A price that doesn't beat the postage, or postage that is implausibly large, means it isn't an inscription sale, and it is dropped.
Which inscription moved
In order of preference:
- Reveal. The listed coin is the output of the transaction that created the inscription (sold straight after minting). The inscription id and its content type come straight from the envelope.
- Chain. The listed coin is where an earlier known sale put the item (a flip), or a later known sale took it from where this sale put it.
- ord. Our
ordindex says which inscription sits on the sats the listed coin sent to the buyer. This only works while the buyer hasn't moved it again.
When none of these can say, the sale is kept with its price and parties and marked "unknown".
Known limits
- A sale that doesn't use a signed listing (for example an over-the-counter trade paid in a separate transaction) is not found.
- The seller and buyer are addresses, not people. One person can use many addresses.
- Collection membership comes from the collection registry (see collections).
- "30 days" is a ceiling. Sales are kept for about 30 days (4,320 blocks), but when the scan first starts it reads back only about 7 days (1,008 blocks). Until it has run for 30 days, a "30 days" figure covers less.
How to check it yourself
Every sale carries its transaction id. On any block explorer the listing input, its signature type and the payment output are visible; on ordinals.com the inscription's history shows the same move.
Also as plain Markdown. See every methodology page.
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