The first ethscription was created in 2016, but the formal protocol was developed by Tom Lehman and Michael Hirsch in june 2023, inspired from Bitcoin ordinals. Ethscriptions are an alternative to smart contracts which are prohibitively expensive for most users and to L2s, which today are centralized. Ethscriptions are cheaper because they store data on-chain using Ethereum transaction calldata within the notes field, not smart contracts.