Ord Alpha
bitcoin ยท ordinals

We just released ord version 0.1.0!

ord is an ordinal number wallet and the index that serves ordinals.com.

This release of ord is by no means complete, but it now supports making ordinal-aware transactions on mainnet using the ord wallet send command thanks to @raphjaph, and boasts much faster indexing thanks to @callmeier.

ord wallet send

The ord wallet commands interact with an existing Bitcoin Core wallet using Core's RPC interface, and this release features a new send subcommand that constructs an ordinal-aware transaction to send a particular ORDINAL to a recipient's ADDRESS:

ord wallet send ORDINAL ADDRESS

We write extensive tests alongside every feature, but bugs can always slip through, and the project as a whole is still immature, so restrictions apply when using ord wallet send with Mainnet wallets.

ord wallet send will refuse to interact with a Mainnet wallet with a name other than ord, which does not start with ord-, to encourage users to explicitly mark wallets as being intended for use with ord.

Using bitcoin-cli wallet commands with an ord wallet risks spending your rarest and most exotic sats, and using ord wallet commands with your main wallet risks doxing your main stash if you assocaite a spicy ordinal with your identity.

Index Optimization

ord must build and maintain an index that maps transaction outputs to ordinal ranges. ord 0.1.0 now exploits the fact that many UTXOs are spent soon after they're created, and uses an in-memory cache to avoid huge numbers of database insertions and retrievals. ord uses the redb database, which is already quite fast, but using an in-memory cache avoids reads from and writes to redb's B-tree, which are more expensive than the in-memory cache's hashmap.

Backwards Compatibility

ord is still alpha-quality software, so breaking changes are inevitable, but starting with version 0.1.0, we'll indicate when breaking changes are included in a release by bumping the minor version number (0.x.0).

Try it out!

Check out ord 0.1.0 and let us know what you think! ord is CC-0-licensed open-source software developed on GitHub.