General overview
How Asteroid Protocol works
What is Asteroid Protocol?
Asteroid Protocol is an open-source metaprotocol framework built on the Cosmos Hub blockchain. It allows anyone to inscribe arbitrary data on-chain — images, video, text, music — and optionally list it for sale in a decentralized marketplace.
How inscriptions work
Inscriptions are created by embedding data directly into Cosmos Hub transactions. Once confirmed, the data is permanently stored on-chain and cannot be deleted or altered.
- Supports files up to ~550KB per inscription
- All major file types supported (JPG, PNG, GIF, MP4, MP3, text, etc.)
- Indexed by the Asteroid Protocol indexer and displayed in the marketplace
CFT-20 Tokens
Asteroid Protocol introduced the Cosmos Fungible Token (CFT-20) standard — a way to deploy, mint, transfer, trade and bridge fungible tokens on Cosmos Hub using inscription transactions.
Open Source
The full source code for the Asteroid Protocol indexer, frontend, and API is available on GitHub.
Key components
- Indexer — reads inscription transactions from the Cosmos Hub and indexes them
- API — provides REST and GraphQL access to indexed inscription data
- Frontend — the marketplace UI at asteroidprotocol.io
- CLI — command-line tool for inscribing and managing tokens