First NFT Minted on Litecoin: Ordinals Ported to LTC Blockchain

A Bitcoin developer has forked the Ordinals project to another proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, Litecoin. The move came after a pseudonymous Twitter user offered some LTC in bounty for the first one who could 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 like 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 sats, Rodarmor explained.

As reported, Ordinals sparked some controversy among Bitcoinists initially. Some purists argued that Bitcoin was designed to focus solely on financial transactions and that Ordinals could come at the cost of scalability and higher transaction fees. On the other hand, supporters noted that it brings new use cases to Bitcoin.

However, despite its rocky start, Ordinals have taken the Bitcoin blockchain by storm. Since January, more than 154,000 Ordinals have been inscribed to the Bitcoin network.

Developer Forks Ordinals to Litecoin

Following the impressive success of Bitcoin Ordinals, a developer has forked the project to the Litecoin blockchain. On Monday, Bitcoin contributor Anthony Gurrera posted a repository to GitHub that forked the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol to Litecoin.

He also placed a copy of MimbleWimble, a privacy and scalability upgrade deployed on the Litecoin network in 2022, to the Litecoin network, making it the first NFT on Litecoin. “The first Litecoin Ordinal has been inscribed 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 one who could 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 the last week.

Litecoin was the only other PoW blockchain on which Ordinals could work. That is because the Segregated Witness (SegWit) proposal and the Taproot upgrade were essential to making Ordinals possible — and Litcoin has both upgrades.

It is worth noting that the cost to inscribe an image onto the Bitcoin blockchain can reach tens of dollars, depending on its size. So far, people have spent nearly more than $1.16 million on inscription fees, according to Dune Analytics.

However, the cost to inscribe a litoshi, the LTC equivalent of a satoshi, is expected to be significantly slower. That is because Litecoin was developed to use the Scrypt hashing algorithm, a memory-intensive algorithm designed to deter GPUs and ASICs, which makes Litecoin more accessible and much cheaper than Bitcoin.

Do you think Ordinals can help drive the price of Bitcoin and Litecoin higher? Let us know in the comments below.