US Bitcoin miner MARA has put a portrait of President-elect Donald Trump on the cryptocurrency blockchain ahead of his return to the White House.
In a post Friday on X (formerly known as Twitter), the publicly traded company said it had put the leader’s portrait back on the block to “honor” his impending inauguration on Monday. President-elect Trump said he would help the digital asset sector and was widely supported by Bitcoiners.
The president-elect’s portrait appears on block 879,613. The company, listed on Nasdaq, added that it also incorporated the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution into the block.
“Bitcoin’s commitment to freedom aligns with America’s eternal principles,” the company said. “Using our proprietary MARA pool, we have permanently embedded the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution into this block, preserving them forever on the Bitcoin network.”
Images and text can be written to the Bitcoin blockchain, made up of blocks containing transaction information, via the NFT-like Ordinals protocol, but what MARA has done 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 the president-elect. In other words, what you’re seeing is a deliberate arrangement of data to create the image of Trump, much like collages that use hundreds or thousands of small images to create a larger portrait of someone.
Bitcoin miners work to process the transactions and blocks that make up the cryptocurrency’s ledger. Such operations are typically large warehouses full of computers that keep the network running, due to the ever-increasing difficulty of Bitcoin mining.
President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on helping the digital asset industry and even pledged to specifically help Bitcoiners, saying any remaining coins should be mined on American soil.
The price of Bitcoin surged following Trump’s surprise victory on November 5 and reached a new all-time high price above $108,000 in December. Bitcoin nearly hit $106,000 on Friday in a surge ahead of the inauguration, closing in on its all-time high price.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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