Ordinals are the new thing taking Bitcoin by storm. In April 2023 alone, the daily record for inscriptions using Ordinals was broken four times as users flooded the network with images, video games, and other content.

Ordinal Inscriptions, similar to NFTs, are digital assets inscribed on a satoshi, the lowest denomination of a Bitcoin (BTC). Inscribing on satoshis, named after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is possible thanks to the Taproot upgrade launched on the Bitcoin network on November 14, 2021.

What is an Ordinal Inscription?

Bitcoin developers have worked to bring non-fungible tokens or NFTs to the number one blockchain for nearly a decade, beginning in 2014 with Counterparty, the creators of the Rare Pepe NFT collection, followed by Stacks in 2017. The Inscription process writes or inscribes the data of the content stored into the witness of the Bitcoin transaction. The witness was introduced in the SegWit upgrade to the Bitcoin network in 2017.

“What the team came up with Ordinals is genius,” Alex Miller, CEO of Hiro, a developer for layer-2 smart contract platform Stacks, told Decrypt in an interview. “It’s super core to the Bitcoin ethos in that they basically took several different things and pieced them together in a way the original creators did not foresee or expect.”

The first step in the creation of Ordinals is users downloading Bitcoin Core and syncing the node to the blockchain. After the sync is completed, the next step is to create an Ordinals wallet and send some satoshis to the wallet.