Parent-Child

Parent-child refers to an Ordinals-native scheme for defining provenance. While it has many implications, the most obvious use-case for it is for creating collections and defining what inscriptions make up said collections.

The owner of an inscription has the ability to create child inscriptions, which establishes a trustless on-chain connection to the parent inscription. This means that the ownership and creation of the child inscriptions are directly linked to the creator/owner of the parent inscription.

These child inscriptions can also have their own children which allows for more intricate, on-chain provenance structures. An example of one of these hierarchies:

1. An artist inscribes a grandparent that represents themselves

2. All collections have their own parent that represents the collection (e.g. the script file for gen art) and is inscribed as a child to the grandparent

3. The pieces that make up a collection are all inscribed as children to their relevant collection parent