Litecoin (LTC) has become the second major cryptocurrency in recent months to welcome NFTs to the blockchain, despite lacking the underlying smart contract infrastructure typically required to mint digital art.
It has done this with the help of the open-source Ordinals project, which was launched on the bitcoin network earlier this month.
Ordinals’ creator Casey Rodarmor discovered that a recent protocol upgrade significantly increased bitcoin’s per-block memory capacity, so much so that digital art, including NFTs and even rudimentary video games could be stored on the network.
Ordinals has been met with disdain from bitcoin fans, but that hasn’t stopped the project from creeping into another cryptoasset, Litecoin.
Australian software engineer Anthony Guerrera appears responsible for the introduction of Ordinals to Litecoin by way of a fork of the Ordinals source code.
Guerrera told Cointelegraph he was encouraged to do the project due to a 22 LTC (around US$2,000) bounty posted by the pseudonymous Twitter user Indigo Nakamoto on Feb. 11 for anyone who was first to successfully create a fork.
Bitcoin Ordinals have steamed above 100,000 units, but it is not yet know what the number is for Litecoin Ordinals.
Transaction volumes have seen no marked increase and price action remains bearish, suggesting no real impact from Litecoin NFT at the momeNT.
What is Litecoin?
Litecoin is one of the original ‘pure’ altcoins, forked from bitcoin source code in 2011.
Pure cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Litecoin are ones designed to facilitate a store of value and medium of exchange, as opposed to facilitating decentralised finance (DeFi) and, eys, NFTs.
Although Litecoin’s fundamentals share some similarities with bitcoin, there are key differences, including four times faster block times and a four times larger maximum circulating supply.
Both Litecoin and bitcoin use the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithms and mining rewards are halved every four years.
Litecoin is also ‘merged mined’ with the popular Dogecoin memecoin, meaning miners can mine for both coins without sacrificing computational performance.