Ordinals Litecoin fork took one week and was ‘quite simple,’ says creator

cointelegraph.com:

A small monetary bounty and an aptitude for coding were all it took to fork the Ordinals protocol to the world’s second-ever cryptocurrency network, Litecoin (LTC) earlier this week, its creator told Cointelegraph.

On Feb. 18, an Australian software engineer by the name of Anthony Guerrera posted a repository to GitHub that forked the Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals protocol to Litecoin. This allowed for nonfungible token (NFT)-like assets on the Litecoin network in much the same way it had made it to Bitcoin earlier in the year.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Guerrera said he was spurred to make a Litecoin Ordinal fork due to a 5 LTC bounty posted by the pseudonymous Twitter user Indigo Nakamoto on Feb. 11 that rose to 22 LTC, or about $2,000, to anyone who was first to successfully create a fork.

22 $LTC to port Ordinals to #Litecoin from:+ 5 $LTC @indigo_nakamoto+ 5 $LTC @ryanwrights+ 5 $LTC @MASTERBTCLTC+ 2 $LTC @ChiefLitecoin+ 5 $LTC @finitemaz https://t.co/7X4JfMzq97

“I knew it was possible because Litecoin has taproot as well as SegWit,” Guerrera said, adding:

Taproot and SegWit are the names given to the Bitcoin protocol updates that aimed to improve the privacy and efficiency of the network but also allowed for NFT-like structures called “inscriptions” to be attached to satoshis.

The cost to inscribe an image onto the Bitcoin blockchain can cost tens of dollars depending on its size but Guerrera said the cost to inscribe a litoshi — the LTC equivalent to a satoshi — is “about two cents.”

A point of contention amongst Bitcoiners is the block space Ordinals take up on the network due to their data size being far greater than transactions. Guerrera doesn’t think this issue will be as prominent on Litecoin due to its larger