By Pepe The Expert
Ordiscan is hands down the best ordinals explorer. The UI and UX are super user friendly. This is a great service to the Ordinals community and will help onboard many people into ordinals and bitcoin. How did the idea come about and what were the challenges in implementing it?
Interestingly, I wasn’t actually planning on building an explorer!
I’ve been playing around with the ord software since its mainnet release, and I started actively thinking about what services I could help build to advance the ecosystem.
My first idea was to build some kind of wallet or marketplace for inscriptions. However, the more I looked into it, the more I realised that there was still some core infrastructure missing in the ordinals space. In order to build all this other cool stuff, you first and foremost need a reliable indexer!
As I built my custom ordinal indexer API, I thought “wow this data is actually really useful, maybe I should just turn it into a web app?” Since I have a background in both design and engineering, I could whip up something decent-looking pretty fast.
The hard part of the Ordiscan project was definitely making the indexing reliable. Indexing transactions with bitcoind and the ord software is quite slow and resource-intensive, so it took a lot of planning and engineering effort to get right.
The work I put into it clearly paid off though – last weekend all the other ordinal explorers went down (twice!) due to a block reorg, but Ordiscan.com kept chugging along nicely and kept showing users the latest data!
What are your favorite inscribing platforms, Ordinals market places and Ordinals wallets?
I’m a big fan of OpenOrdex, I think the way Oren Yomtov combined Bitcoin PSBTs with the Nostr network is really clever! When it comes to wallets, I’ve only played around with the Xverse and Hiro browser extensions, but I’m super impressed by how quickly they added support for inscriptions and PSBTs.
I think we’re about see an explosion of new marketplaces and wallets adding support for these features in the next few months, so I’m very excited about the future!
Your thoughts on magic eden support for ordinals?
It’s a smart move and I want to give them extra props for open-sourcing their PSBT signer library, msigner!
My guess is that all the big NFT marketplaces are currently rushing to add support for ordinals as fast as they can, and Magic Eden just happened to get there first. It’s obviously a huge sign of legitimacy, and proof that inscriptions on Bitcoin are not going away anytime soon!
What other ordinals projects are you working on?
I’m a proud member of the Taproot Wizards team! I think Udi and Eric have done a wonderful job bringing the magic back to the Bitcoin culture, as demonstrated by the thousands of people on Twitter posting videos of themselves showering in their wizard costumes!
Other than that, I’m just going to keep improving Ordiscan.com with new features and see where it leads! I’m fascinated by projects like .sats names and BRC20 where the inscription data could potentially create brand new logic layers on top of Bitcoin. It’s definitely something I want to explore more!
Are you OrdTlds Satoshi, the author of Ord Tlds (Top Level Domains) White paper on OrdTlds.com ? In fact the first Ordinals TLD was listed on OrdinalsWallet today and it looks interesting.
Hi! I’m not OrdTlds Satoshi, no 😄
Ordinals 
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