'Monero Punks' inscribes first-ever NFT collection on Monero

Monero Punks¹ has inscribed the first-ever 100 NFTs² on Monero, thanks to the new Monero Ordinals Project³:

First 100 Monero Punks were inscribed with inscriptions 2-102. Thanks a lot for the help of amazing @m0rdinals team!⁴

Technical details and instructions on how to mint and control inscriptions are available on Github/Gitbook⁵’⁶:

An “ordinal” is considered to be the output of a transaction (the 0th output) that contains special data (tx_extra_ordinal_register in the extra field) [..] Implementing ordinals in Monero seemed like an interesting and challenging idea to us.

From a cultural point of view, it is hard to see how NFTs could ever find success on Monero, considering the community’s divergent fundamental values.

However, the timing of this project is rather curious, as it seems to coincide with the resurface of the tx_extra⁷ debate in recent MRL meetings⁸. It will be interesting to see if this story has any impact on future discussions.

This is an ongoing story and the report will be updated when new information is available.

Update 23/3/16: Monero community reacted promptly to the story, with lots of calls to remove⁹ ordinals on Monero / tx_extra, while others tried making the case for keeping the feature¹⁰.

Update 23/3/17: (extra information) Monero Ordinals Project uses Monero’s ‘tx_extra’ field⁷ in transactions created with its own modified fork of the Monero CLI wallet to mint ordinals on top of the Monero blockchain.

Update 23/3/19: PR to limit size of ‘tx_extra’ was merged in effort to block NFTs¹¹.

Update 23/3/25: Monero Ordinals Project responded to community efforts to restrict mordinals (NFTs)¹².

Update 23/4/4: m0rdinals devs introduced the ability to transfer mordinals and a new software patch addressing low quality images: aggressive price scaling algorithm for image storing, based on Monero’s priority coefficient¹³; apparently the mordinals.org viewer app is currently only displaying mordinals submitted with a high enough fee.