A software engineer named Anthony Guerrera revealed that he was able to fork the Ordinals protocol to Litecoin (LTC) with just a small monetary reward and his coding skills. Guerrera posted a repository on GitHub on February 18 that forked the Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals protocol to Litecoin, allowing for nonfungible token (NFT)-like assets on the Litecoin network. This was made possible by the 5 LTC bounty offered by a Twitter user called Indigo Nakamoto, which eventually increased to 22 LTC, or around $2,000. Guerrera explained that he knew it was possible to fork Litecoin because it has Taproot and SegWit, which are Bitcoin protocol updates that enable privacy and efficiency improvements. The cost to inscribe an image onto the Litecoin blockchain is much lower compared to Bitcoin, with litoshis costing about two cents. Guerrera believes that the issue of Ordinals taking up block space on the network will not be as prominent on Litecoin due to its larger block size. It took Guerrera approximately one week to create the LTC fork, as the changes needed were relatively simple. He updated the Ordinals code to work with inputs from the Litecoin network instead of the Bitcoin network and accounted for parameters that differed between the blockchains. Guerrera announced on Twitter that he had inscribed the first ever Litecoin Ordinal, which was the MimbleWimble whitepaper, in the “inscription 0.” This comes after the recent Mimblewimble Extension Blocks (MWEB) upgrade in May 2022, which allows Litecoin users to opt-in to confidential transactions and other blockchain improvements. Guerrera plans to continue contributing to the forked protocol and will port across updates from the original Ordinals. However, he also mentioned that he may hand over the project to someone else in the future as he has other commitments.
Creator of Litecoin fork describes the process as "quite simple" spanning a week