Bitcoin was constructed to maneuver cash, not host house movies. But for greater than a decade, builders, artists, and trolls have smuggled animated pictures and video clips into on-chain transaction information.
Tens of 1000’s of archival nodes around the globe obtain them, validate them, and retailer them or their possession certificates on arduous drives indefinitely. A few of it’s artwork. Most of it’s simply foolish.
The strategies vary from elegant to absurd. Some codecs wrap a file inside a single transaction’s witness information or stamp pixels into transaction outputs. Different strategies slice information into weird non-public keys.
Just a few stash content material in Counterparty servers or different pointer-type certificates of possession.
Regardless of the methodology, one unifying characteristic is permanence. As soon as miners affirm a video clip or its metadata inside a block, nobody can scrub it out.
Under is one instance per format kind. Every video paid a BTC transaction payment to be mined as a consensus-valid transaction. Every will sit on each archival Bitcoin node for so long as the community exists.
Bitcoin’s first GIF was a Pepe
Lengthy earlier than the phrases “NFTs” or “Ordinals” entered the crypto trade, Counterparty was sliding arbitrary information into Bitcoin transactions.
By 2016, a person recognized solely as Mike started issuing Uncommon Pepe digital buying and selling playing cards on the protocol. Collection 1, Card 37, UFOPEPE, is well known as the primary recognized GIF on Bitcoin, though solely a part of it really resided on-chain.
An early protocol by hobbyists, Counterparty customers didn’t retailer all information for every picture and GIF video on the blockchain, however somewhat relied on third-party storage providers. Possession and hyperlinks to any internet hosting service did, nevertheless, switch on-chain.
The cardboard exhibits Pepe the Frog in a flying saucer. The Uncommon Pepe listing’s submission guidelines explicitly permitted animated GIFs as much as 1.5 megabytes.
That’s how a cartoon frog with extraterrestrial ambitions turned one of many earliest transferring pictures completely encoded into Bitcoin lore.
A chook having an excellent time eternally
Inscription 2, inscribed onto Bitcoin’s blockchain utilizing a novel method in December 2022, is an animated GIF connected to Bitcoin’s blockchain through Casey Rodarmor’s Ordinals protocol.
Like Counterparty, Ordinals inscriptions require the person to run specialised software program to interpret Bitcoin’s blockchain in a method that renders the picture by default.
Nonetheless, all the picture is there, on the blockchain, with no third-party internet hosting service.
It depicts a colourful chook looping via a dance transfer. It landed on the blockchain a month earlier than Rodarmor formally launched ORD software program model 0.4.0 in January 2023, the model he marketed as prepared for mainnet inscriptions.
That launch listed solely HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, MP3, PNG, and JPEG as supported content material varieties.
Undeterred, a classy early inscriber examined the boundary by publishing a GIF anyway. The protocol accepted it. The community mined it.
Though Bitcoin Core software program doesn’t render Ordinals as pictures by default, the chook has been vibing on tens of 1000’s of nodes for years.
A frog tailslide
By 2025, ORD software program added mainstream help for video information, and somebody within the Rodarmor’s Hell Cash Podcast orbit took benefit.
Inscription 84,106,770, mined in February 2025, inside Bitcoin block 881,921, is an MP4 file of a skateboarder grinding a bottom tailslide with a inexperienced cartoon frog head hovering over his face.
The clip lives contiguously inside a single Taproot transaction’s witness information. Like all Ordinals-based inscriptions, Bitcoin Core software program doesn’t render the video by default, but all the information to render it exists on Bitcoin’s blockchain.
Pixel-art animations stamped into UTXOs
Bitcoin Stamps pushed permanence additional. The SRC-20 protocol, launched by a pseudonymous developer who goes by “Mike in Area,” encodes base64 picture information straight into Counterparty-like transaction outputs.
Not like Taproot witness information, nodes can’t 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, simply 213 bytes, which renders beneath.
Though Bitcoin Core doesn’t render STAMP movies by default, like Ordinals movies, anybody can obtain Stamps software program to view the Bitcoin blockchain and render these pictures from the information on any full node.
Stamps helps PNG, JPG, GIF, SVG, and HTML information as much as 65 kilobytes. That leaves room for brief looping animations.
Bypassing filters with on-chain media
There are different artisanal strategies to publish full movies on the Bitcoin community that skip easy-to-use protocols like Counterparty, Ordinals, or STAMPS.
In early 2026, for instance, Bitcoin developer Martin Habovštiak confirmed that he may pack a 66 kilobyte image into one Bitcoin transaction with out going close to OP_RETURN or Taproot witness information.
His trick was to craft the uncooked transaction in order that its bytes additionally occurred to be a legitimate picture. The maneuver which used a weird but legitimate non-public key sailed previous each standardness filter the conservative Knots crowd had shipped.
🚨 JUST IN: this picture was mined into block 938576 with out OP_RETURN, displaying Knots filtering doesn’t forestall it.
The transaction was included through MARA Slipstream.
It was created by bitcoin developer Martin Habovstiak, who revealed an in depth analysis paper explaining precisely… pic.twitter.com/mCS97SPBhd
— Kristian Csepcsar (@KristianCsep) February 27, 2026
Habovštiak’s tactic deliberately landed in the course of infighting over a sequence fork proposal to ban such arbitrary information storage on the consensus layer.
Though intelligent and clearly meant to troll Luke Dashjr, developer of Bitcoin node software program Knots whose mempool filters arbitrary information extra aggressively than Bitcoin Core, this bypass failed to achieve a lot actual world utility.
It additionally makes use of a non-standard transaction kind, i.e. not propagated by Bitcoin Core’s default mempool, and thus requires larger payment funds and guide routing of every transaction to a miner.
Protos was unable to search out an instance of a GIF or MP4 file utilizing Habovštiak’s bypass, nevertheless it’s attainable that one exists on-chain, and anybody may craft such a transaction and pay a miner to mine it.
If any exist, like all on-chain information on the famously restricted Bitcoin community, it must be very small.
Habovštiak has admitted a ceiling of 66 kilobytes for his technique, though different methodologies may be attainable to accommodate bigger information.
