Bitcoin was created to maneuver cash, to not host residence movies. However for greater than a decade, builders, artists, and trolls have been sneaking animated photographs and video clips into on-chain transaction knowledge.
Tens of 1000’s of archive nodes world wide obtain them, confirm them, and retailer them or their possession certificates on their laborious drives indefinitely. Some are artwork. Most of it’s simply silly.
The strategies vary from the elegant to the absurd. Some codecs wrap information inside a single transaction's monitoring knowledge or stamp pixels on the transaction output. Different strategies contain slicing the file into unusual personal keys.
Disguise some content material in possession certificates on counterparty servers or different pointer sorts.
Regardless of the methodology, one frequent function is persistence. As soon as a miner sees a video clip or its metadata in a block, nobody can delete it.
Under is one instance for every format sort. Every video paid a BTC transaction price to be mined as a consensus legitimate transaction. Every exists on each archive Bitcoin node for so long as the community exists.
Bitcoin's first GIF was Pepe
Lengthy earlier than the phrases “NFT” or “ordinal” appeared within the crypto trade, counterparties had been sliding arbitrary knowledge into Bitcoin transactions.
By 2016, a consumer recognized solely as Mike started issuing Uncommon Pepe digital buying and selling playing cards on the protocol. Collection 1, Card 37, UFOPEPE is broadly considered the primary recognized GIF on Bitcoin, however solely a portion of it really exists on-chain.
Customers of Counterparty, an early hobbyist protocol, didn’t retailer all the information for every picture and GIF video on the blockchain, counting on third-party storage providers. Nevertheless, the possession and hyperlink to the internet hosting service has been transferred on-chain.
The cardboard options Pepe the frog driving a flying saucer. The Uncommon Pepe listing's posting guidelines explicitly allowed animated GIFs as much as 1.5 megabytes.
Thus, a cartoon of a frog with extraterrestrial ambitions turned one of many earliest transferring photographs completely encoded into Bitcoin lore.
A chook that all the time has enjoyable
Inscription 2, inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain utilizing new know-how in December 2022, is an animated GIF hooked up to the Bitcoin blockchain through Casey Rodarmor's Ordinals protocol.
Just like Counterparty, Ordinals' Inscription requires customers to run specialised software program to interpret the Bitcoin blockchain in a method that renders photographs by default.
Nonetheless, the complete picture is on the blockchain and there aren’t any third-party internet hosting providers.
It depicts a colourful chook performing looping dance strikes. It appeared on the blockchain a month earlier than Rodarmor formally launched ORD software program model 0.4.0 in January 2023. That is the model he marketed as prepared for mainnet registration.
On this launch, solely HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, MP3, PNG, and JPEG had been listed as supported content material sorts.
Undaunted, the delicate early writers examined the boundaries by publishing GIFs. The protocol accepted it. The community mined it.
Bitcoin Core software program doesn’t render ordinal numbers as photographs by default, however this chook has been vibrating on tens of 1000’s of nodes for years.
frog tail slide
By 2025, ORD software program added mainstream assist for video information, and somebody in Rodarmor's Hell Cash podcast orbit took benefit of it.
Inscription 84,106,770, mined in February 2025 inside Bitcoin block 881,921, is an MP4 file of a skateboarder sprucing a bottom tailslide with a inexperienced cartoon frog head floating above his face.
Clips exist contiguously inside the monitoring knowledge of a single Taproot transaction. As with all ordinal-based inscriptions, Bitcoin core software program doesn’t render movies by default, however all the information for rendering movies resides on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Pixel artwork animation stamped on UTXO
Bitcoin Stamps pushed permanence even additional. The SRC-20 protocol was launched by an nameless developer often known as “Mike of the Universe” and encodes base64 picture knowledge straight into counterparty-like transaction outputs.
Not like Taproot monitoring knowledge, nodes can not prune these outputs with out breaking consensus.
One of many earliest video stamps is stamp 54, created on March 18, 2023. The file could be very small, solely 213 bytes, and may be seen beneath.
Though Bitcoin Core doesn’t render STAMP movies by default like Ordinals movies, anybody can obtain the Stamps software program to view the Bitcoin blockchain and render these photographs from knowledge on a full node.
Stamps assist PNG, JPG, GIF, SVG, and HTML information as much as 65 kilobytes. This leaves room for brief looping animations.
Bypassing filters with on-chain media
There are different artisanal methods to publish full video on the Bitcoin community, skipping easy-to-use protocols like Counterparty, Ordinals, and STAMPS.
For instance, in early 2026, Bitcoin developer Martin Habovštiak confirmed that 66 kilobytes of photographs may be packed right into a single Bitcoin transaction with out coming near OP_RETURN or Taproot sighting knowledge.
His trick was to create a uncooked transaction in order that its bytes would even be legitimate photographs. Utilizing an odd however efficient personal key, the operation bypassed all normal filters mounted by the conservative Knots group.
🚨 JUST IN: This picture was mined in block 938576 with out OP_RETURN, indicating that the knot filter can not stop it.
This transaction was included through MARA Slipstream.
It was created by Bitcoin developer Martin Habofstiak, who revealed an in depth analysis paper explaining precisely… pic.twitter.com/mCS97SPBhd
— Kristian Csep (@KristianCsep) February 27, 2026
Habovštiak's tactic intentionally landed within the midst of infighting over a proposed chain fork that might prohibit such arbitrary knowledge storage on the consensus layer.
Though this bypass was intelligent and clearly supposed to troll Luke Dashjr, the developer of the Bitcoin node software program Knots, whose reminiscence pool filters arbitrary knowledge extra aggressively than Bitcoin core, this bypass by no means gained a lot utility in the true world.
It additionally makes use of non-standard transaction sorts, i.e. transaction sorts that aren’t propagated by Bitcoin Core's default reminiscence pool, which requires paying greater charges and manually routing every transaction to miners.
Though Protos couldn’t discover any examples of GIF or MP4 information utilizing Habovštiak's bypass, it’s potential that they exist on the chain, and anybody can create such a transaction and pay a miner to mine it.
Like all on-chain information on the Bitcoin community, which is notoriously restricted, it have to be very small, if in any respect.
Habovštiak acknowledges that his methodology has an higher restrict of 66 kilobytes, however different methodologies could possibly accommodate bigger information.
