Ordinals on Bitcoin debuted in January 2023 and have been a hot topic of discussion since then. On one hand, people from the industry have been excited to welcome NFTs to Bitcoin. On the other hand, skeptics have been debating how Ordinals unlock a world of dangers for the Bitcoin network, including malware assaults and soaring transaction costs.
Ordinal Inscriptions are quite similar to NFTs but come with a slight twist. Simply put, they are digital assets inscribed on a Satoshi, the lowest denomination of Bitcoin. The network’s SegWit and Taproot upgrades that took place to improve the privacy and efficiency of the network also opened the doors for Satoshi inscriptions. According to Dune Analytics, over 153.6k ordinal inscriptions have been created.
Recently, a developer forked the Ordinals project to PoW blockchain Litecoin. During the weekend, Australian software engineer Anthony Guerrera posted a repository on GitHub that forked the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol to Litecoin.
Also Read: Bitcoin Ordinals NFTs: What Is It All About?
How it all started?
Last week, a pseudonymous Twitter user with the username indigo_nakamoto offered around 5 LTC [approximately $500] to anyone who could port Ordinals to Litecoin. The reward was later increased to 15 LTC and 22 LTC.
Elaborating on the essence of the same, Anthony Guerrera told Decrypt,
“Basically, I was motivated by the bounty that Indigo and a few others put out for someone to port Ordinals to Litecoin. I approached Indigo about a week ago to step up to the challenge.”
Litecoin was the network picked because of its similar blueprint to the Bitcoin network. The coder further asserted that Litecoin was the perfect network for Ordinals because it could handle more data in an individual transaction at a lesser cost when compared to Bitcoin.
Guerrera further revealed that he initially found issues with the dependency on Rust-Bitcoin. Notably, it did not support the MimbleWimble upgrade on Litecoin. For context, Rust is a programming language that focuses on safety, performance, and concurrency. Explaining how he overcame the said hurdle, Guerrera reportedly said,
“I forked rust-bitcoin to make one that is able to work with Litecoin MWEB. [This allows] Ordinals to decode the block data and safely ignore the extension block MWEB.”
Now, with MWEB built into the chain, users will be able to transfer funds privately before inscribing.
Also Read: NFT Sales Surge and Reach 90-Day High, Here’s Why