Ordinal’s Litecoin fork took a week and was “pretty easy,” says its creator

A small cash prize and a knack for coding was all it took to share the Ordinals protocol of the world’s second cryptocurrency network, Litecoin (LTC), earlier this week, its creator told Cointelegraph.

On February 18, an Australian software engineer named Anthony Guerrera posted a repository to GitHub that forked the Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals protocol to Litecoin. This allowed for nonfungible token (NFT)-like assets on the Litecoin network in much the same way it had done for Bitcoin earlier this year.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Guerrera said he was spurred to create a Litecoin Ordinal fork because of a 5 LTC bounty posted by pseudonymous Twitter user Indigo Nakamoto on February 11 that rose to 22 LTC, or about $2,000 , to all who were first. to successfully create a fork.

“I knew it was possible because Litecoin has taproot as well as SegWit,” Guerrera said, adding:

“I was in a bit of a rush trying to get it done as quickly as I could.”

Taproot and SegWit are the names given to the Bitcoin protocol updates that aimed to improve the privacy and efficiency of the network, but also made it possible to attach NFT-like structures called “inscriptions” to satoshis.

The cost of entering an image onto the Bitcoin blockchain can cost tens of dollars depending on its size, but Guerrera said the cost of entering a litoshi — the LTC equivalent of one satoshi — is “about two cents.”

A point of contention among Bitcoiners is the block space Ordinals take up on the network due to their data size being far larger than transactions. Guerrera doesn’t think this issue will be as prominent on Litecoin due to its larger block size, but it could still occur.

“Pandora’s box has already been opened and someone was going to do it, so it might as well be me.”

Guerrera said his LTC fork took about a week to make, as “the changes were pretty simple.” He explained that he updated the Ordinals code to work with inputs from the Litecoin network instead of the Bitcoin network.

Parameters that differed between the blockchains, such as the total possible number of coins and differences in block time creation, also had to be factored into the fork.

In a February 19 tweet, Guerrera said he had entered the first ever Litecoin Ordinal, putting the MimbleWimble whitepaper on the blockchain in the so-called “inscription 0”.

The inscription to the white paper follows the May 2022 Mimblewimble Extension Blocks (MWEB) upgrade, which will allow Litecoin users to opt-in for confidential transactions and other blockchain improvements to help reduce redundant and unnecessary transaction data.

Related: How the Ordinals movement will benefit the Bitcoin blockchain

“I wanted to dedicate the first inscription to it and bring attention to the fact that Litecoin now has this privacy sidechain attached to it,” Guerrera said.

“I’m a fan of the technology, and I like that privacy can become a thing on these public accounts.”

As for the future of the forked protocol, Guerrera will “continue to contribute to this fork as much as I can” and port updates from the original Ordinals.

“I’ll probably hand this off as I don’t want it to take up too much of my time,” he added. “I do other things. I have other things on my plate.”