Developer ports it to Litecoin

by James · February 21, 2023

Ordinals on Bitcoin debuted in January 2023 and have been a hot topic of discussion ever since. On the one hand, people from the industry have been happy to welcome NFTs to Bitcoin. On the other hand, skeptics have discussed how Ordinals unlock a world of dangers for the Bitcoin network, including malware attacks and skyrocketing transaction costs.

Ordinary inscriptions are quite similar to NFTs, but come with a slight twist. Simply put, the digital assets are inscribed with 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 153.6,000 ordinary inscriptions have been created.

Recently, a developer gave the Ordinals project to the PoW blockchain Litecoin. Over the weekend, Australian software engineer Anthony Guerrera posted a repository on GitHub that gave 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.

Anthony Guerrera elaborated on the essence of the same, told Decrypt,

“Initially, I was motivated by the bounty that Indigo and a few others gave someone to transfer Ordinals to Litecoin. I approached Indigo about a week ago to take on the challenge.”

Litecoin was the network chosen because of its similar plan to the Bitcoin network. The coder further claimed that Litecoin was the perfect network for Ordinals because it could handle more data in an individual transaction at a lower cost compared to Bitcoin.

Guerrera further revealed that he first found problems with the Rust-Bitcoin addiction. In particular, it did not support the MimbleWimble upgrade on Litecoin. For context, Rust is a programming language that focuses on security, performance, and concurrency. Explaining how he overcame the aforementioned hurdle, Guerrera reportedly said:

“I forked rust bitcoin to make one that can 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 signing up.

Also Read: NFT Sales Rise and Now 90-Day High, Here’s Why