ord
👁🗨 Rare and exotic sats
The Lens
Ord is the reference implementation for Bitcoin Ordinals, the protocol that lets you inscribe data directly onto individual satoshis. The package includes a CLI wallet, a block explorer, and indexing tools. Fully free, open source, and community-funded.
Running ord requires a fully synced Bitcoin Core node with transaction indexing enabled: 1TB+ disk and days of initial sync. The CLI manages inscriptions and wallet operations. It processes every block as they come in, so you are committing to ongoing maintenance, not a set-it-and-forget-it setup.
Bitcoin developers and anyone building on the Ordinals protocol need this. There is no real alternative because this is the reference implementation. If you are not specifically building on Bitcoin Ordinals, this is not relevant to you. Niche but exactly right for that niche.
The catch: the block explorer renders untrusted HTML and JavaScript from inscriptions. The team warns about this explicitly. Host it with access controls, not publicly open.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree tier: Completely free. CC0 licensed.
Self-hosted: Requires a synced Bitcoin Core node (1TB+ disk). No software cost; infrastructure cost is the hosting.
Paid: No paid tier.
Free to use; the cost is the hardware for a full Bitcoin Core node.
Get tools like this every Wednesday
One featured tool, three on the radar. No fluff.
License: Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
Review license manually.
Commercial use: ✗ Restricted
About
- Owner
- ordinals (Organization)
- Stars
- 3,955
- Forks
- 1,484
Explore Further
More tools in the directory
cc-switch
A cross-platform desktop All-in-One assistant tool for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, openclaw & Gemini CLI.
79.1k ★nautilus_trader
Production-grade Rust-native trading engine with deterministic event-driven architecture
23.0k ★kreuzberg
A polyglot document intelligence framework with a Rust core. Extract text, metadata, images, and structured information from PDFs, Office documents, images, and 91+ formats. Available for Rust, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, PHP, Elixir, C#, R, C, TypeScript (Node/Bun/Wasm/Deno)- or use via CLI, REST API, or MCP server.
8.4k ★