How Ordinals Came to Be

There have been words on Twitter, so I thought it would be useful to write down how ordinals came to be.

Ordinals is a few things. Ordinals proper is made up of ordinal numbers, the numbering and tracking of satoshis, designed ultimately as vehicles for NFTs; inscriptions, the NFTs which ride on the backs of ordinals; runes, the degenerate black sheep of the protocol family; and ord, the open-source computer program which implements ordinals, inscriptions, and runes.

Along the way there have been a two ordinals-related entities that I've been involved with. The first was Ordinals Corporation, a short-lived startup founded when ordinals, the protocol, started taking off, which was dissolved nearly as soon as it was created, and did exactly nothing. The second is the non-profit Open Ordinals Institute, a going concern, which accepts donations, pays for the ordinals.com servers, and funds open-source contributors to ord.

I first learned about NFTs back when they were taking off on Ethereum in 2017. I wasn't initially very interested in them, but I did talk a bit with my friend Parker Day, a photographer, about turning some of her portraits into NFTs, although we didn't wind up pursuing it.

NFTs came on my radar again in mid-2021, when Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs was released. I had made generative art in the past, but there was never a market for it, and suddenly beautiful generative NFTs were selling for real money. I experimented with NFTs on Ethereum, but was turned off, to put it mildly, by the reality of NFTs on Ethereum. The tooling was terrible, the ERC-721 standard meant that each NFT had different semantics, and the content was all stored off-chain.

This, combined with my existing dislike of Ethereum, made me decide to try to figure out how to make NFTs on Bitcoin which didn't suffer from the issues inherent to existing NFTs on Ethereum and earlier standards for NFTs on Bitcoin.

I started noodling. From the start, I wanted the protocol to be UTXO-based, and to use Bitcoin's native cryptography and script for transactions. Anything else would have been much more complex, much less featureful, and would not have fit in nicely with the rest of the ecosystem. However, UTXOs are ephemeral. The pop into existence when created by a transaction, and pop just as suddenly out of existence when spent.

I had the idea for "atoms", one of which would be created in every block, and which would subsequently hop from coin to coin with each transaction. I made the first to commit to the repo, then called bitcoin-atoms, on 2021-12-12.

My friend Liam Scalzulli, who I had worked on other open-source projects with, started working on the project with me, and he made his his first commit to the repo on 2022-1-28.

I had some very helpful conversations about atoms with mconst, Eric Sirion, Rijndael, and Jeremy Rubin, and eventually came up with ordinals, the numbering and tracking of individual satoshis, as an alternative to atoms. On 2022-1-5 I renamed the bitcoin-atoms repo to ord. On 2022-2-22 I posted a draft of the ordinals BIP to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, and on 2022-3-9 I bought ordinals.com, ordinals.net, and ordinals.org. The .net and .org were free, but the .com was for sale for $2000. Easily the best money I've ever spent!

I came up with an off-chain NFT scheme, where the creator of an NFT would sign a message assigning a piece of content to an ordinal without needing to make a Bitcoin transaction, and gave a workshop at BTC++ in Austin 2022-6-8, where participants got paper wallets loaded with sats and issued their own NFTs.

Around this time Raph started working on the project, and made his first commit on 2022-9-6. You can see the major contributors to the project over time, including Liam and Raph, on GitHub.

The off-chain NFT scheme had a lot of issues. Users would need to send NFTs out-of-band, and it would be impossible to run a public server with all NFTs, since there were no rate or content size limits.

I started trying to figure out where I could stuff content into the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin script, in the form of scriptpubkeys or scriptsigs, were the obvious choice. Most script types were limited in size, ether by consensus or standardness, but taproot scripts had no limit, so they became the vehicle. Funnily enough, these script-based NFTs were originally called "runes", but we switched to "inscriptions" and it stuck.

We did a lot of work on the wallet, and on 2022-12-14 I made the first mainnet inscription, followed quickly thereafter by the second mainnet inscription by Rijndael.

The ord wallet inscribe command was initially disabled on mainnet, and on 2023-1-9 we enabled it, and on 2023-1-20 I tweeted that inscriptions were ready for mainnet.

That same day I opened the now infamous PR requesting a BIP number for ordinals, which languishes open to this day.

There was a trickle of inscriptions, then more, and then a rush, filling every block. It was clear: Ordinals had gone nuclear.

With the protocol a wild success, I started having vague ideas about a startup, unrelated to the protocol, because that seemed like that's was what one does in those circumstances. On 2023-2-3 I incorporated Ordinals Corporation, co-founded by myself, Ordinally, Erin, and Rocktoshi. Ordinals Corporation never had a clear line of business, issued any shares, held any assets, or undertook any business activities. It was dissolved less than three months later on 2023-4-30. May it rest in peace.

The next few months were an insane rush of attention and chaos, and ultimately extremely personally stressful. I took a hiatus from everything, although in reality I hadn't been particularly productive even before making it official. Things eventually started to get back to normal, and in August I started working on ord again.

On 2023-8-1, the Open Ordinals Institute was incorporated, a much more unambitious entity whose sole purpose was to accept donations, pay for the ordinals.com servers, and fund open source contributors to ord, which it continues to do to this day.