Bitcoin Ordinals Developers Release New Upgrade to Make ‘Cursed Inscriptions’ Tradable

Jimmy Aki
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Bitcoin Ordinals developers have just released a new upgrade intended to fix 71,000+ cursed inscriptions and make them tradable.

V0.6.0 to Recognise ‘Cursed Inscriptions’

In a series of new posts on Twitter, the developers of the famous Bitcoin Ordinals announced the launch of ord v0.6.0, which implements the first step to solving the problem of unindexed or unrecognized inscriptions called “cursed inscriptions.”

One of the developers behind Ordinals, @raphjaph, also mentioned in recent Tweets that the newly released upgrade (v0.6.0) would recognize more types of inscriptions, including cursed inscriptions.

The developer further stated that the new upgrade also allows passing in RPC credentials via command-line flags, environmental vars, or a config file.

Providing more context, an influencer on Twitter, @LeonidasNFT, confirmed in a recent post that the new Ordinals upgrade does support a group of curse inscriptions.

The explanatory post highlights how the new Ordinals upgrade is important because over 70K previously invalid inscriptions are now supported and will soon be tradeable on marketplaces.

The Twitter post also mentioned that a negative inscription number is now assigned to all the cursed inscriptions, while normal Ordinals inscriptions have a positive inscription number.

According to @LeonidasNFT, the important thing to note about the inscription numbers is that the positive numbers will never change, while the negative numbers for cursed inscriptions can change.

This simply means that anyone having cursed inscriptions with negative numbers need not worry because the numbers will likely change.

They will also soon get to trade them on marketplaces that will roll out support for the newly launched upgrade.

Why ‘Cursed Inscriptions’ Are a Big Deal

Ordinal Inscriptions became a big deal after Bitcoin Ordinals launched in January 2023.

On a basic level, the Bitcoin Ordinals are non-fungible asset artifacts that allow the inscription of data onto satoshi, the smallest monetary unit of a Bitcoin.

Just a month after Ordinals launched, the rave about Ordinal inscriptions took off, and transaction fees began to grow big as usual with newly launched crypto projects.

This led to high transaction fees on the foremost proof-of-work (PoW) protocol, with a Dune Analytics report estimating that $45.5 million was spent in fees following the trade of 10.8 million Ordinals NFTs.

On April 25, 2023, the issue of cursed inscriptions was officially mentioned on the ord GitHub page by the lead developer of the Bitcoin Ordinals project, Casey Rodarmor.

He adopted the word “cursed inscriptions” when describing some Ordinal inscriptions that aren’t getting identified or indexed.

Rodarmor briefly explained some of the causes of this cursed inscriptions problem and proposed possible ways the issue could be fixed.

Meanwhile, Twitter user @cbspears also made a post on May 29 revealing that the example inscription on the docs.ordinals.com website itself is most likely cursed.

The Ord development team never responded directly to this specific observation, but the latest v0.6.0 upgrade features some solutions to cursed inscription issues relating to opcodes usage, like in the example.

While the new upgrade to fix cursed inscriptions is the latest highlight of the Ordinals project, an earlier important announcement was also made by Casey Rodarmor – the lead developer.

In a Twitter post on May 28, he announced stepping down and passing the lead role to Raphjaph.

More importantly, Rodarmor revealed that Raphjaph is an impoverished student whose work on the Ord project will be funded by donations.

About Jimmy Aki PRO INVESTOR

Based in the UK, Jimmy is an economic researcher with outstanding hands-on and heads-on experience in Macroeconomic finance analysis, forecasting and planning. He has honed his skills having worked cross-continental as a finance analyst, which gives him inter-cultural experience. He currently has a strong passion for regulation and macroeconomic trends as it allows him peek under the global bonnet to see how the world works.