Why Bitcoin's Blockchain Forever Stores Videos and GIFs Despite Original Purpose

Bitcoin was built for financial transactions, not to host videos or GIFs. Yet for more than a decade, developers, artists, and even trolls have exploited the blockchain to smuggle animated images and video clips into on-chain transaction data.

Tens of thousands of archival nodes worldwide download, validate, and store these files—or their ownership certificates—on hard drives indefinitely. Some of the content is art; most is trivial. The methods used range from elegant to absurd: embedding files within a single transaction’s witness data, stamping pixels into transaction outputs, slicing files into bizarre private keys, or stashing content in Counterparty servers or other pointer-type ownership certificates.

Regardless of the method, one unifying feature remains: permanence. Once miners confirm a video clip or its metadata within a block, it cannot be scrubbed from the blockchain. Below are examples of each format type. Each video paid a BTC transaction fee to be mined as a consensus-valid transaction and will reside on every archival Bitcoin node for as long as the network exists.

Bitcoin’s First GIF: Pepe the Frog on the Blockchain

Long before the terms “NFTs” or “Ordinals” entered the crypto lexicon, Counterparty was already embedding arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions. By 2016, a user known only as Mike began issuing Rare Pepe digital trading cards on the protocol.

Rare Pepe Series 1, Card 37 (UFOPEPE) is widely recognized as the first known GIF on Bitcoin, though only part of it resided on-chain. The card depicts Pepe the Frog in a flying saucer. The Rare Pepe directory’s submission rules explicitly allowed animated GIFs up to 1.5 megabytes.

An early protocol by hobbyists, Counterparty users did not store all image and GIF data directly on the blockchain. Instead, they relied on third-party storage services, with ownership and links to hosting services transferring on-chain. Despite this, UFOPEPE became one of the earliest moving images permanently encoded into Bitcoin’s history.

Inscription 2: The First GIF via Bitcoin Ordinals

Inscription 2, inscribed onto Bitcoin’s blockchain in December 2022 using Casey Rodarmor’s Ordinals protocol, is an animated GIF attached directly to the blockchain. Like Counterparty, Ordinals inscriptions require specialized software to interpret the blockchain and render the image by default. However, unlike Counterparty, the entire image resides on the blockchain with no reliance on third-party hosting.

The GIF depicts a colorful bird looping through a dance move. It was inscribed a month before Rodarmor formally released Ordinals software version 0.4.0 in January 2023, which he marketed as ready for mainnet inscriptions. The release listed only HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, MP3, PNG, and JPEG as supported content types.

Undeterred, an early inscriber tested the protocol’s boundaries by publishing a GIF anyway. The protocol accepted it, and the network mined it. Although Bitcoin Core software does not render Ordinals as images by default, the data remains embedded in the blockchain permanently.