In late January, Casey Rodarmor unveiled the Ordinals protocol for the Bitcoin network, which enables any digital asset to be transferred along with transactions by sequentially numbering mined satoshis. This is similar to NFTs that once drove the Ethereum network's explosive growth. 

All minted digital assets remain online forever and can be resold or donated. A variety of services to facilitate ordinal transactions are expected to be launched in the near future.

Despite the scepticism from some parts, interest in ordinals remains high. More than 160,000 assets have been minted so far, from which miners have already secured an additional USD 1.2 million in revenues.

Since Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin and supports the SegWit and Taproot updates, the development of ordinals was only a matter of time. To speed up the process, users offered a reward of 22 LTC (~USD 2,000) to the first developer to write the code.

On 19 February, Australian programmer Anthony Herrera posted a tweet about the creation of the first ordinal in the Litecoin network. He used the technical documentation of the MimbleWimble (MVEB) update as a digital asset, through which users can make confidential transactions on public blockchains. MVEB was rolled out on Litecoin in May 2022, leading to the delisting of the coin on a number of cryptocurrency exchanges.

It takes 2.5 minutes to create a block in Litecoin versus 10 minutes for Bitcoin, and the average transaction fee is almost 100 times lower ($0.016 versus $1.47, respectively). This makes the network more sought after for practical applications, including ordinal minting, which could lead to the increased use of Litecoin by up-and-coming artists.

The Ethereum network was once competing with Solana, when shortly after its launch, MagicEden topped the dominant OpenSea in terms of the number of NFT transactions.

The average Litecoin block size has increased five-fold in the past few days since the new protocol was introduced, indicating that digital assets are actively being minted.

Together with the anticipated mid-year halving (a reduction in blockchain mining fees from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC), the emergence of ordinals could be a catalyst for the coin's growth in 2023.

StormGain Analytical Group 
(platform for trading, exchanging and storing cryptocurrency)