The videos stored on Bitcoin’s blockchain forever

Bitcoin was built to move money, not host home videos. Yet for more than a decade, developers, artists, and trolls have smuggled animated images and video clips into on-chain transaction data. 

Tens of thousands of archival nodes around the world download them, validate them, and store them or their ownership certificates on hard drives indefinitely. Some of it’s art. Most of it’s just silly.

The methods range from elegant to absurd. Some formats wrap a file inside a single transaction’s witness data or stamp pixels into transaction outputs. Other methods slice files into bizarre private keys.

A few stash content in Counterparty servers or other pointer-type certificates of ownership.

No matter the methodology, one unifying feature is permanence. Once miners confirm a video clip or its metadata within a block, no one can scrub it out.

Below is one example per format type. Each video paid a BTC transaction fee to be mined as a consensus-valid transaction. Each will sit on every archival Bitcoin node for as long as the network exists.

Read more: Bitcoin mining industry mostly uninterested in spam controversy

Bitcoin’s first GIF was a Pepe

Long before the words “NFTs” or “Ordinals” entered the crypto industry, Counterparty was sliding arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions.

By 2016, a user known only as Mike began issuing Rare Pepe digital trading cards on the protocol. Series 1, Card 37, UFOPEPE, is widely recognized as the first known GIF on Bitcoin, although only part of it actually resided on-chain.

An early protocol by hobbyists, Counterparty users didn’t store all data for each image and GIF video on the blockchain, but rather relied on third-party storage services. Ownership and links to any hosting service did, however, transfer on-chain.

The card shows Pepe the Frog in a flying saucer. The Rare Pepe directory’s submission rules explicitly permitted animated GIFs up to 1.5 megabytes.

That’s how a cartoon frog with extraterrestrial ambitions became one of the earliest moving images permanently encoded into Bitcoin lore.

A bird having a good time forever

Inscription 2, inscribed onto Bitcoin’s blockchain using a novel technique in December 2022, is an animated GIF attached to Bitcoin’s blockchain via Casey Rodarmor’s Ordinals protocol.

Like Counterparty, Ordinals inscriptions require the user to run specialized software to interpret Bitcoin’s blockchain in a way that renders the image by default.

Still, the entire image is there, on the blockchain, with no third-party hosting service.

It depicts a colorful bird looping through a dance move. It landed on the blockchain a month before Rodarmor formally released ORD software version 0.4.0 in January 2023, the version he marketed as ready for mainnet inscriptions.

That release listed only HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, MP3, PNG, and JPEG as supported content types.

Undeterred, a sophisticated early inscriber tested the boundary by publishing a GIF anyway. The protocol accepted it. The network mined it.

Although Bitcoin Core software doesn’t render Ordinals as images by default, the bird has been vibing on tens of thousands of nodes for years.

A frog tailslide

By 2025, ORD software added mainstream support for video files, and someone in the Rodarmor’s Hell Money Podcast orbit took advantage.

Inscription 84,106,770, mined in February 2025, within Bitcoin block 881,921, is an MP4 file of a skateboarder grinding a backside tailslide with a green cartoon frog head hovering over his face.

The clip lives contiguously inside a single Taproot transaction’s witness data. Like all Ordinals-based inscriptions, Bitcoin Core software doesn’t render the video by default, yet all the data to render it exists on Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Pixel-art animations stamped into UTXOs

Bitcoin Stamps pushed permanence further. The SRC-20 protocol, launched by a pseudonymous developer who goes by “Mike in Space,” encodes base64 image data directly into Counterparty-like transaction outputs.

Unlike Taproot witness data, nodes cannot prune those outputs without breaking consensus.

One of the earliest video stamps is Stamp 54, created on March 18, 2023. The file is very small, just 213 bytes, which renders below.

Although Bitcoin Core doesn’t render STAMP videos by default, like Ordinals videos, anyone can download Stamps software to view the Bitcoin blockchain and render these images from the data on any full node.

Stamps supports PNG, JPG, GIF, SVG, and HTML files up to 65 kilobytes. That leaves room for short looping animations.

There are other artisanal methods to publish full videos on the Bitcoin network that skip easy-to-use protocols like Counterparty, Ordinals, or STAMPS.

In early 2026, for example, Bitcoin developer Martin Habovštiak showed that he could pack a 66 kilobyte picture into one Bitcoin transaction without going near OP_RETURN or Taproot witness data.

His trick was to craft the raw transaction so that its bytes also happened to be a valid image. The maneuver which used a bizarre yet valid private key sailed past every standardness filter the conservative Knots crowd had shipped.

Habovštiak’s tactic intentionally landed in the middle of infighting over a chain fork proposal to ban such arbitrary data storage at the consensus layer.

Although clever and obviously intended to troll Luke Dashjr, developer of Bitcoin node software Knots whose mempool filters arbitrary data more aggressively than Bitcoin Core, this bypass failed to gain much real world utility.

It also uses a non-standard transaction type, i.e. not propagated by Bitcoin Core’s default mempool, and thus requires higher fee payments and manual routing of each transaction to a miner.

Protos was unable to find an example of a GIF or MP4 file using Habovštiak’s bypass, but it’s possible that one exists on-chain, and anyone could craft such a transaction and pay a miner to mine it.

If any exist, like all on-chain files on the famously restricted Bitcoin network, it would have to be very small.

Habovštiak has admitted a ceiling of 66 kilobytes for his method, although other methodologies might be possible to accommodate larger files.

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