Forked Bitcoin Ordinals Brought to Litecoin

An Australian software engineer named Anthony Guerrera, going by the name ynohthna92 on GitHub, has successfully created a fork for the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol to support the Litecoin network. Consequently, ynohtna92 minted the debut Litecoin Ordinal, a first for one of the oldest cryptocurrencies in the world.

According to an 18 February repository posting on GitHub, the new Ordinals protocol on Litecoin now allows for non-fungible token-like digital assets to be introduced to the Litecoin network, similar to the Bitcoin network a few weeks ago.

The first-ever Litecoin Ordinal

To get the development in line with Litecoin’s latest MWEB upgrade, the coder inscribed the Mimble Wimble white paper, known as inscription 0, onto the first Litecoin Ordinal. The Mimble Wimble upgrade on the Litecoin blockchain was launched in May 2022 to improve the network’s privacy and transaction size.

Launched on Bitcoin a few weeks ago, it has created a storm in the crypto sphere. According to Dune Analytics, its ability to mint content besides transactions has already made more than 154,000 inscriptions. The feat took the developer only one week and was incentivized by a "small monetary bounty".

Launched in 2011 as a fork of Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC) is a peer-to-peer digital asset specifically designed to overcome some of BTC's initial challenges, especially the speed of processing transactions. LTC was the brainchild of former Google employee Charlie Lee, who sold it in 2017 to circumvent potential conflicts of interest. The race to bring in this new fork began on 10 February after an anonymous Twitter user, Indigo Nakamoto, threw a challenge to any coder who could port Ordinals to Litecoin for 5LTC – approximately $500.

Dedicated to the MWEB upgrade

Exactly one week later, Guerrera completed forking the GitHub repository and launched it. According to Guerrera, Ordinals could only work on the LTC network because of its soft forks of the SegWit and Taproot technologies associated with Bitcoin, which are required to make Ordinals work.

Guerrera, who calls himself a fan of technology who loves to see privacy introduced in public ledgers, dedicated the first inscription to the Mimble Wimble Extension Blocks (MWEB) upgrade. He added he'd hand it over as he's "got other things on his plate". However, he would keep contributing to the new fork and port all updates from the initial Ordinals.

At the time of writing, Litecoin is the 14th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, at $6,955,377,781 on CoinMarketCap, and trading at $96.19.