American Bitcoin miner MARA has put a portrait of President-elect Donald Trump onto the cryptocy’s blockchain ahead of his return to the White House. In a Friday post on X (formerly known as Twitter), the publicly traded company said it had put the portrait of the soon-to-be-returning leader on the block to “honor” his impending inauguration on Monday. President-elect Trump has said he will help the digital asset industry and has been widely supported by Bitcoiners.
The portrait of the President-elect appears on block 879,613. The company, which trades on the Nasdaq, added that it also embedded the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution in the block. “Bitcoin’s commitment to freedom aligns with America’s eternal principles,” the company said. “Using our proprietary MARA Pool, we permanently embedded the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution into this block, preserving them forever on the Bitcoin network.”
Images and text can be inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain—which is made up of blocks containing transaction information—via the NFT-like Ordinals protocol, but what MARA did is different. Because the miner controls which transactions are processed, it was able to select certain data corresponding to different colors to shape the portrait of President-elect.
In other words, what you’re seeing is a purposeful arrangement of data to create the image of Trump, not unlike collages that use hundreds or thousands of tiny images to create a larger portrait of someone. Bitcoin miners work to process transactions and blocks that make up the cryptocy’s ledger. Such operations are typically large warehouses full of computers that keep the network running, due to the ever-increasing difficulty of mining Bitcoin.
President-elect Donald Trump campaigned to help the digital asset industry and even made a pledge to specifically help Bitcoiners, claiming that all remaining coins should be mined on American soil. The price of Bitcoin has surged off the back of Trump’s shock November 5 win, and hit a new all-time high price above $108,000 in December. Bitcoin nearly hit $106,000 on Friday in a pre-inauguration surge, coming close to matching its peak price.
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