<aside> 📍 Quadkey is an Inscription project on Bitcoin Ordinals that utilizes a geospatial indexing standard to demonstrate several new underlying technologies.

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What are quadkeys?

Quadkeys, also known as “quad-tree keys”, are a spatial indexing system commonly used in digital mapping and cartography to represent and organize geographic data. They provide a compact and hierarchical representation of the spatial extent of a tile or an area on a map. The concept of quadkeys originates from quad-trees, a tree data structure used for efficient representation and querying of spatial data.

How does the quadkey system work?

At its core, a quadkey is a unique string of characters that represents a tile or an area on a map. The term "quadkey" is derived from the fact that it is based on a quad-tree structure, which recursively divides a two-dimensional space into four equal quadrants. Each quadrant is further divided into four sub-quadrants, and this process continues until a desired level of detail or resolution is achieved.

Deeper dive on Quadkey

Other/current uses of the quadkey system

Who are we?

Quadkey is a project created by OrdinalHub, a product of Luxor Tech. OrdinalHub tracks, analyzes, and aggregates Inscriptions. We at OrdinalHub are building primitives & tooling for the Ordinals ecosystem such as our own Indexer client (GORD), Inscription service, novel block building techniques, and ordinals integration into the broader Luxor tech mining stack.

Why did we create Quadkey?

Quadkey is a demonstration project to achieve a few goals.

• First, we wanted to prove out how ‘enveloping’ under the ordinals documentation could provide long-term value to this community. Enveloping is part of the ordinals protocol which allows a type of tagging to as part of the inscription process, along with various other benefits. The envelope can be carried forward to make indexing more simplified, which could have dramatic positive effects downstream for explorers, marketplaces, wallets and more. Each consumer of data from an ord client (or GORD), would have a shortcut to achieve alignment and consensus on a given new metaprotocol out of the gate. This increases consistency and speed to market, as well as protects users in the long run.
• Second, OrdinalHub wanted to tackle a few internal infrastructure competencies including a simplified inscription tool, downstream dynamic indexing, and serving up clean endpoints via API for our partners. This end-to-end demonstration may unlock many new useful contained business models where Luxor/OrdinalHub can provide real value, leveraging ordinals.