Ordinals have taken over the Bitcoin network with almost 154000 inscriptions being logged so far, stats from Dune analytics indicated.
Ordinals have recently gained popularity and reached their peak on Valentine’s Day with the inscription of the 100,000th ordinal.
Similar to nonfungible tokens [NFTs], these Inscriptions are digital assets. They can be inscribed into one Satoshi, the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin.
The Inscription process involves writing or inscribing the data of the content stored into the witness of the Bitcoin transaction. The witness was introduced in the SegWit upgrade to the BTC network in 2017.
Segregated Witness [SegWit] refers to a change in the transaction format of Bitcoin.
The maximum size for Bitcoin blocks should be 1MB. But, Ordinal users can now add 3MB of data to each block thanks to SegWit and Taproot.
A few days back industry experts observed the on-chain effect of the Ordinal craze.
“Inscription fee rates, mean block size, and taproot utilization are all exploding, while the mempool (transaction queue) is beginning to fill for the first time in months.”
Delphi Digital on Feb. 19, reported that more than 140,000 Ordinals have been inscribed over the last month. It went on to explain:
“Users inscribe data to these specific sats, arguably fundamentally changing Bitcoin’s fungibility. Ordinals can provide wild ramifications for sat providence and the entire chain.”
It added that pressure on fees is on the rise as well as blocks are getting bigger, “which is increasing BTC’s security budget and miner profitability.”
According to the researchers, ordinal inscriptions started on December 17, 2022, although users didn’t start writing until January 21, 2023. “Since then, we have seen the market go parabolic,” it said.
The Ordinals project has now been adapted for rival proof-of-work blockchain Litecoin.
Bitcoin Ordinals Now In Litecoin
It all began on February 10, when a pseudonymous Twitter user, who goes by the name Indigo Nakamoto, offered 5 LTC [roughly $500] to anyone who could port Ordinals to Litecoin.
Subsequently, on 19 Feb. software engineer, Anthony Guerrera rolled out the Litecoin Ordinals project on GitHub after forking the GitHub repository for Bitcoin Ordinals posted by Casey Rodarmor in January.
The reason behind choosing Litecoin as per Guerrera was that it has soft forks of the SegWit and Taproot technologies featured in Bitcoin, both of which are necessary for Ordinals to function. As a result, Litecoin is the only other blockchain on which Ordinals could operate.