The Litecoin community unveiled the LTC-20 standard dedicated to the creation of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
Meanwhile, the price of LTC is following the trend of major cryptos, losing altitude over the past seven days.
Litecoin and the LTC-20 standard for NFTs: How the protocol under test works
Litecoin is following the development of Bitcoin at the same pace, so much so that after the boom of Bitcoin NFT ordinals based on the BRC-20 standard, here comes the LTC-20 standard for Litecoin NFT ordinals. The development of this protocol, which is still in the experimental stage, is not led by the official Litecoin account, but by the Litecoin Punks, the collection of the first 100 Litecoin Ordinals with entries from #642 to #834.
Therefore, this is a testing phase directly conducted by members of the Litecoin community against the new LTC-20 standard. In any case, the official LTC-20 document states the following:
“This is just a fun experimental standard demonstrating that you can create off-chain balance states with inscriptions. It by no means should be considered THE standard for fungibility on litecoin with ordinals, as I believe there are almost certainly better design choices and optimization improvements to be made. Consequently, this is an extremely dynamic experiment, and I strongly discourage any financial decisions to be made on the basis of it’s design. I do, however, encourage the litecoin community to tinker with standard designs and optimizations until a general consensus on best practices is met (or to decide that this is a bad idea altogether!)”.
Litecoin Ordinals NFTs: Was the LTC-20 standard the result of a bet?
It was back in February when Twitter user Indigo Nakamotoist, in the wake of the launch of Bitcoin Ordinals NFTs, offered 5 LTC to anyone who could bring Ordinals NFTs to Litecoin.
Subsequently, other users joined the ‘wager’, raising the prize to 22 LTC.
Developer Anthony Guerrera reportedly responded by saying that Litecoin was the only other blockchain that Ordinals could run on, thanks to SegWit and Taproot, convincing himself that it was feasible.
And indeed, on 18 February, Guerrera announced that he had succeeded in his mission to create the first Litecoin Ordinals NFT, receiving the 22 LTC reward at his wallet address.
The goal of this initiative was to enable Ordinals NFT transactions without having to pay the high fees required to register transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. After all, Litecoin was born to be the digital silver, the crypto that only replaces Bitcoin when the digital gold network becomes congested.
Bitcoin Ordinals NFT record numbers
Just this week, Bitcoin Ordinals NFT inscriptions have literally soared, reaching 3.6 million today, with the 1st of May being the day when daily BTC transactions reached their all-time high.
Indeed, on Monday there were 372,000 entries in just 24 hours, with 682,281 BTC transactions.
Not only that, but these record numbers were accompanied by network commissions, which also reached 23 BTC or approximately $656,000 on Monday.
Yesterday, 4 May, there were 206,669 daily Bitcoin Ordinals NFT registrations, with 14.92 BTC in commissions paid in 24 hours.
LTC crypto price and Charlie Lee’s predictions
Despite the big news for Litecoin, its LTC seems to be following the trend of the major cryptos. And indeed, over the past 7 days, the price of LTC has seen a slight dip, bringing it to $88 at the time of writing.
Nothing to worry about, or perhaps just a price correction. The fact is that from the beginning of 2023 to the present, the price of LTC has been on a bull run.
If you listen to the words of Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, then you can expect a huge profit from LTC, especially in view of the crypto‘s planned halving in August next year.
In fact, according to Lee, the LTC/BTC pair could rise to 0.025 BTC or over 700% in the next bullish cycle, with Litecoin having higher throughput by design, scalability with extension blocks, better fungibility and privacy from MWEB.
Litecoin’s halving of the miner reward from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC.
