What is "GORD"?

We've been hard at work the past few months building our own version of the ord client from the ground up. As of right now, our live site & everything we do is running off of our own Gord client. Why did we do this and what does it accomplish?

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Benefits:

• More clients == better ecosystem
• Flexibility to build customized products and protocols
• Golang is adopted easier for certain developers
• Full control of the tech stack

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The Ordinals protocol is a system developed by Casey Rodarmor that uses Ordinal Theory to track the origination & movement of satoshis throughout the Bitcoin blockchain. In January 2023, Casey released a client called "ord" that implemented Ordinal Theory & allowed used to create Inscriptions. The ord client continues to be maintained and updated today and at the time of writing most of the ordinals ecosystem runs off of some fork of ord.

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the ordinals project client, ord 0.7.0

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We've rebuilt the ord client from the ground up in a different programming language - Golang, or "Go" and we call this client "gord". Go is “a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.” Go compiles fast & is quick to learn, which is one of the reasons we use it a lot at Luxor. Additionally, it allows us to build a relational database & possibly achieve a more performant client.

We also believe in building a lot of backend tooling in-house so that we can understand the full tech stack.

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Grafana view of gord

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What does Gord do?

Gord does everything the Ordinals client does and then sets us up to do even more. We want to provide tooling for other marketplaces, ecosystem analytics, and wallets that allows them to focus on building their main product instead of maintaining their ord client.

Out the gate, Gord allowed us to index all of the Inscriptions, not just the ones that the ord client recognized. These days we call most of these "Cursed" Inscriptions, but that's a great example of a feature Gord had before the ord client back when we were testing Gord in April.

We believe Ordinal Theory and Bitcoin's blockspace in general has a lot more interesting ideas to be developed. Gord allows us to explore different enveloping mechanisms, metaprotocols, and mime datatypes.

Anyone who's been here for a little while remembers the issues the BRC-20 standard has experienced with indexing and indexers providing a unified "state". Also those BRC-20s being minted kind of screwed up all our pretty Inscription explorer views! Imagine if there were another metaprotocol like BRC-20 that took advantage of a dedicated envelope to distinguish it from other Inscriptions

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example envelope "env" for a new kind of asset to be indexed

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Where will Gord go?

Right now we are serving up Gord to our own in-house tooling. We expect some in the Ordinals ecosystem to be immediately curious about integrating it (feel free to inquire)

We want to help provide robust consensus on the Ordinals Protocol. More clients means more datapoints and faster response + iteration time. OrdinalHub & Luxor want to be good stewards of this new ecosystem and we plan on cooperating with other major ecosystem stakeholders including the Ordinals Project team.

Once the ecosystem 'groks' the potential of multiple clients & client diversity, we could see some pretty interesting ideas emerge. We want to help the good ones gain foothold, perhaps we help provide working client for your new metaprotocol on Day 1, immediately served up & available to everyone at launch.

But eventually we could see Gord expand into other areas of Bitcoin not just limited to Ordinals. It's an evolving client and we want to respond to the market. We hope you like it!

Feel free to reach out to us if you're interested about plugging Gord into something you're doing!

- Golang is adopted easier for certain developers

- Full control of the tech stack

- Golang is adopted easier for certain developers

- Full control of the tech stack

- Golang is adopted easier for certain developers

- Full control of the tech stack