Over the course of 332 transactions, an anonymous wallet spent about 1.5 BTC, worth about $66,000 at current prices, to inscribe almost 9 megabytes of encrypted data onto the Bitcoin blockchain.
The most expensive transactions cost thousands of dollars each in fees, though most of the transactions were closer to $200 . However, as the data remains encrypted, no one has yet been able to read the inscribed data.
The X account of Ordinals explorer Ord.io posted about the inscription, leading to jokes, speculation, and Rickrolls from X users speculating on the motive behind the actions.
The process was enabled through the Ordinals protocol, which ascribes data to certain satoshis — the smallest unit of a Bitcoin. Ordinals are commonly used to store art directly on-chain, though all types of data can be inscribed, including encrypted text.
The inscription isn’t the only apparently strange use of the Bitcoin blockchain recently. An anonymous wallet recently sent $1.2 million to the Genesis wallet mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. Funds from Satoshi’s wallets haven’t moved since 2010, meaning the money is most likely irretrievable.
