It was developer Casey Rodarmor who first came up with the Ordinal protocol for the purpose of ‘inscribing’ imagery and text on the Bitcoin network.
Now, it has also been introduced on the Litecoin and Dogecoin network, which has driven up their transaction volumes exponentially for the third week in a row.
Transaction volume
On May 18th, a new transaction volume record was established on the Dogecoin network. According to the numbers accumulated, the total number of transactions in a 24-hour period was 1.2 million.
Likewise, the Litecoin network saw the total number of transactions in a 24-hour period make a new record on May 10th, when they reached 584,000.
Ordinals had first been introduced on the Litecoin network when Indigo Nakamoto, a Twitter user, had offered a prize of 5 LTC for ‘porting’ the Ordinals protocol onto the network.
The prize had been valued at $500 back then. Anthony Guerrera, a software engineer, was able to achieve success eight days later.
On February 19th, he introduced the Litecoin Ordinals protocol and it did not take long for DOGE enthusiasts to catch up.
Likewise, the same functionality was also introduced on the Dogecoin network and the protocol was named ‘Doginals’.
Token standards
However, the real reason behind the rise in token activity on both the Dogecoin and Litecoin networks was not the introduction of the ordinals.
It was primarily due to the launch of the new token standards, which are DRC-20 and LRC-20 that were rolled out at the beginning of May.
Thanks to the introduction of these standards, users could now develop and issue new meme tokens on both the Litecoin and Dogecoin networks.
It was around the same time that the massive rise in activity was recorded on both DOGE and LTC networks.
In fact, it also saw the Bitcoin network record a rise in the Ordinals inscription, as on May 10th, the total number of transactions recorded was 400,000.
The rise in Bitcoin Ordinals can also be attributed directly to the introduction of the BRC-20 token standard, which resulted in more than 24,000 new tokens minted on the blockchain.
Price Drop
Meanwhile, the price performance of the top crypto tokens as well as meme tokens was disappointing at the start of the week.
In fact, Monday saw Bitcoin as well as other leading crypto tokens trade lower, as they drifted further downwards after marking a small recovery over the weekend.
The early hours of trading saw DOGE also record declines close to 3% in its price, a trend that has been seen consistently in the last few weeks.
However, the downward trend in the broader crypto market meant that other meme tokens like Shiba Inu also recorded drops in their prices.