The ordinals protocol was officially launched on the bitcoin mainnet by bitcoin core contributor and software engineer Casey Rodarmor
The nascent ordinals protocol enables individuals who operate bitcoin nodes to directly inscribe each satoshi or sat with data without needing a separate sidechain or token.
Ordinals are fundamentally different from most existing NFTs in that they are NFTs that can be directly minted onto the bitcoin blockchain.
Ordinals completely store the data for the digital asset on-chain as opposed to pointing to a server that hosts the data.