Ordinals Comes to Litecoin

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  • Ordinals has been launched on the Litecoin network
  • The popular NFT inscription service will enjoy added privacy through Mimblewimble
  • A 22 LTC bounty was on offer to the developer who could achieve it

The massively popular Ordinals project has morphed to Litecoin having taken the Bitcoin blockchain by storm just 11 days after a bounty was offered to the developer who could accomplish the feat. Over 153,000 inscriptions have been made on the Ordinals blockchain and Litecoin supporters will be hoping for similar levels of success on their blockchain, the software for which was launched on Sunday.

Reward Grew From 5 LTC to 22 LTC

The suggestion of porting Ordinals to Litecoin was put forward by a coder by the Twitter handle of @indigo_nakamoto, who initially offered 5 LTC to the person who launched the NFT-creation tool on the 12-year-old network. Ordinals allows users to send and receive sats that carry optional extra data, which can be in the form of text, JPEGs, audio or videos. Their usage has split the community, with Bitcoin maximalists angry that the Bitcoin blockchain is being used for anything other than money, while others see it as a legitimate use of the blockchain and a great way to increase overall adoption.

Being a fork of Bitcoin, Litecoin had the capability of introducing the same features necessary for Ordinals to run – Segregated Witness (Segwit) and Taproot. Litecoin actually introduced Segwit three months before Bitcoin in May 2017, while Taproot was activated on the blockchain in May 2022.

Mimblewimble Adds Further Privacy

As the clamour for Ordinals on Litecoin increased, so did the bounty, with 22 LTC ($2,000) eventually offered as a reward. On Sunday, software engineer Anthony Guerrera launched the Litecoin Ordinals project on GitHub, but it wasn’t plain sailing – having forked the Ordinals code from Bitcoin, he found that it did not support the MimbleWimble Litecoin upgrade.

To overcome this he forked the programming language rust-Bitcoin and tweaked it to work with Mimblewimble, which now means that users have added privacy when they inscribe something.

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