What is Teleburning?

Last February, Jason Williams burned his $169,000 Bored Ape Yacht Club #1626 on Ethereum and Inscribed it forever onto Bitcoin Ordinals. Since then, we've seen Milady Makers, ENS Addresses, and many Ordinals collections be teleburned on ETH to Bitcoin. But what actually is teleburning?

Teleburning is when you "burn" an asset on one blockchain and forever migrate it to an inscription on Bitcoin Ordinals.

In the words of Casey Rodarmor, teleburning an asset is like saying: "I'm out [of Ethereum]. Find me on Bitcoin".

Our guide on how to teleburn on your own!

Let's dive a little deeper!

Inscriptions on Bitcoin have an Inscription ID attached to them. This is not the inscription number, it's an ID that is unique to each inscription. You can see it below:

This inscription ID is used to generate an address on another blockchain like Ethereum. That address on eth is actually a burn address – an address without a corresponding private key. So any assets sent to that address on ethereum are forever "burned" or inaccessible.

Because the address on Ethereum corresponds to an inscription ID, we can then provably link the asset on Bitcoin with the ethereum address! This allows anyone to migrate any digital asset or NFT on one blockchain to Bitcoin forever.

We can see the corresponding Eth teleburn address on the ordinals.com inscription explorer:

If we go to the corresponding ENS domain, we can see that rodarmor.eth is at address 0xe43A06530BdF8A4e067581f48Fae3b535559dA9e, confirming that this asset now "lives" on the corresponding inscription on Bitcoin.

Who's been teleburning?

Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, was the first to burn his rodarmor.eth ENS address on February 11, 2023. Later that same day, notable crypto influencer Jason Williams teleburned his BAYC #1626, at the time worth $169,000.

Many others have teleburned too. Milady's have been a popular asset to teleburn since early on as well as entire early collections on ordinals.

Technical details:

How to derive a teleburn address: Ethereum teleburn addresses are derived by taking the first 20 bytes of the SHA-256 hash of the inscription ID, serialized as 36 bytes, with the first 32 bytes containing the transaction ID, and the last four bytes containing big-endian inscription index, and interpreting it as an Ethereum address.

Can you teleburn from other chains?

You should be able to teleburn from other chains soon, we would expect other EVM chains to be the easiest to integrate. There are multiple PRs in the works for chains like Solana, Tezos, etc.

Head to the ord github repo and the Ordinals docs to get the full technical breakdown of how teleburning works!