First NFT Minted on Litecoin: Ordinals Transferred to the LTC Blockchain
A Bitcoin developer has fork The Ordinals project of another proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, Litecoin. The move came after a pseudonymous Twitter user offered some LTC as a bounty for the first to port Ordinals to Litecoin.
Ordinals take Bitcoin by storm after Rocky Start
Launched earlier this year, Bitcoin Ordinals is a new protocol designed and deployed by former Bitcoin Core contributor Casey Rodarmor that enables users to explore, transfer and receive individual satoshis – the atomic unit of Bitcoin – which can include unique inscribed data.
The protocol uses “inscriptions,” which are arbitrary content such as text or images that can be added to sequentially numbered satoshis, or “sats,” to create unique “digital artifacts” that can be held and transferred across the Bitcoin network like any other stake, Rodarmor explained .
As reported, Ordinals sparked some controversy among Bitcoinists in the first place. Some purists argued that Bitcoin was designed to focus solely on financial transactions and that Ordinals could come at the expense of scalability and higher transaction fees. On the other hand, supporters noted that it brings new use cases to Bitcoin.
However, despite their rocky start, Ordinals have taken the Bitcoin blockchain by storm. Since January, more than 154,000 Ordinals have been entered into the Bitcoin network.
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Developing Forks Ordinals to Litecoin
After the impressive success of Bitcoin Ordinals, a developer has distributed the project to the Litecoin blockchain. On Monday, Bitcoin contributor Anthony Gurrera posted a repository to GitHub that gave the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol to Litecoin.
He also placed a copy of MimbleWimble, a privacy and scalability upgrade that was deployed on the Litecoin network in 2022, to the Litecoin network, making it the first NFT on Litecoin. “The first Litecoin Ordinal has been entered on the Litecoin blockchain,” he tweeted.
The effort came after a pseudonymous Twitter user with the username indigo_nakamoto offered a bounty of 5 LTC (worth around $500) for the first to port Ordinals to Litecoin. “5 LTC to whoever ports this to Litecoin,” the user said in a February 11 tweet. The bounty eventually rose to 22 LTC (around $2,100) by the end of last week.
Litecoin was the only other PoW blockchain that Ordinals could work with. That’s because the proposal for Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the Taproot upgrade were critical to making Ordinals possible – and Litcoin has both upgrades.
It is worth noting that the cost of entering an image on the Bitcoin blockchain can reach tens of dollars, depending on its size. So far, people have spent almost more than $1.16 million on registration fees, according to Dune Analytics.
However, the cost of listing a litoshi, the LTC equivalent of a satoshi, is expected to be significantly lower. That’s because Litecoin was developed to use the Scrypt hashing algorithm, a memory-intensive algorithm designed to deter GPUs and ASICs, making Litecoin more accessible and much cheaper than Bitcoin.
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About the author
Ruholamin Haqshanas is an accomplished crypto and financial journalist with over two years of experience writing in the field. He has a solid grasp of various segments of the FinTech space, including the decentralized iteration of financial systems (DeFi), and the emerging market for non-fungible tokens (NFT). He is an active user of digital assets for money transfers.
