Litecoin’s blockchain last week experienced over 584,838 transactions in one day, the highest in its history, according to crypto data website Bitinfocharts.
Why? Because people are using Litecoin for Ordinals, a new craze in the crypto world which allows digital assets like pictures or moving images to be inscribed on a blockchain—just like NFTs.
This has caused activity on Bitcoin’s blockchain to surge—and transaction fees, too—as people use the network to mint new assets.
In February, a coder brought Ordinals to Litecoin’s blockchain and people have taken note. The Litecoin Foundation, a non-profit that pushes for the cryptocurrency’s adoption, told Decrypt that over 2.6 million Litecoin Ordinals have been inscribed on the blockchain.
“The Litecoin network so far has handled this enthusiasm without any issues,” they said in an email, adding that Litecoin fees have remained the same—despite the increase in activity.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin transaction fees have soared to two-year highs since Ordinals became popular, leading some in the community to blast the craze.
There’s another wave of NFTs starting to flood the Bitcoin blockchain—and they’re not in the form of Ordinals. The emergent STAMPS (Secure Tradeable Art Maintained Securely) protocol is proposing a different method of embedding image data into the OG blockchain, making different tradeoffs compared to the inscription technology that exploded in popularity earlier this year. Rather than storing image data within prunable transaction witness data, “Bitcoin Stamps” store it directly within spendable…
