An Australian software engineer named Anthony Guerrera recently revealed that he was able to fork the Ordinals protocol to Litecoin (LTC), the world’s second-ever cryptocurrency network. Guerrera explained that he was motivated to create this fork after seeing a 5 LTC bounty posted on Twitter by a user named Indigo Nakamoto. The bounty eventually increased to 22 LTC ($2,000) for the first person to successfully create the fork.
Guerrera stated that he knew it was possible to create the fork because Litecoin has similar features to Bitcoin, such as Taproot and SegWit. These features allow for the attachment of nonfungible token (NFT)-like assets, known as “inscriptions,” to the cryptocurrency. While it can be costly to inscribe images onto the Bitcoin blockchain, with costs reaching tens of dollars, inscribing a litoshi (the LTC equivalent of a satoshi) only costs about two cents.
One concern among Bitcoin users is the amount of block space that Ordinals take up on the network, as their data size is larger than regular transactions. Guerrera believes that this issue may not be as significant on Litecoin due to its larger block size, but it could still potentially arise.
Creating the LTC fork took Guerrera about a week, as he had to update the Ordinals code to work with the Litecoin network instead of Bitcoin. He also had to account for parameters that differed between the two blockchains, such as the total possible number of coins and block time creation differences.
Guerrera announced on Twitter that he inscribed the first-ever Litecoin Ordinal, which consisted of the MimbleWimble whitepaper. This inscription comes after the recent Mimblewimble Extension Blocks (MWEB) upgrade, which allows Litecoin users to opt-in to confidential transactions and other blockchain improvements.
Looking ahead, Guerrera plans to continue contributing to the forked protocol and incorporate updates from the original Ordinals. However, he also expressed a desire to hand over the project in the future to focus on other commitments.