Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings immortalizes portrait of Trump as block art
2025-01-18
Category: None

MARA Holdings, the bitcoin mining company that trades on the Nasdaq, has hashed a portrait of Donald Trump, the incoming 47th president of the United States, onto the Bitcoin blockchain. The president-elect’s visage is now immortalized onchain, specifically at block 879613, and is visible on indexers like Mempool.space.
“Today, MARA mined the ‘Trump 47’ block, a historic visual marker on the Bitcoin blockchain to honor the inauguration of President-Elect @realDonaldTrump, the first Bitcoin President of the United States,” the company wrote in a post on X on Friday.
Trump, a former critic of crypto, has said he will advocate for industry concerns during his upcoming administration, including appointing David Sacks as the newly-created “Crypto Czar” cabinet position to advance regulation and create a “strategic bitcoin reserve.”
Additionally, Trump has pledged to support the domestic Bitcoin mining industry, even calling for the U.S. to capture 100% of the network’s total hashpower. The U.S. currently accounts for approximately 25%.
Mining stocks have been on a tear ahead of the inauguration on Monday. The market cap of 16 mining stocks tracked by JPMorgan increased 16% to $4.5 billion in the first two weeks of the year. MARA shares are up nearly 13% on Friday, trading hands at $20.67.
On the campaign trail, Trump endeared himself to the crypto industry by making overt promises to fire the crypto-critical head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, and pardon Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, on “day one.”
Trump’s rhetoric has earned him support from many in the mining sector. For instance, Riot Platforms CEO Jason Les met with Trump in June 2024 during a fundraising event while Hive Digital moved from Vancouver, Canada to Texas motivated by Trump’s policies and the prospect of cheap energy.
MARA, which also appended a copy of the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution into the block, created the technique of ordering transactions to create images visible to certain block indexers without inscribing a Bitcoin ordinal or minting an NFT. The company’s first experiment with ordering transactions using a custom block template was an advertisement for the firm featuring a red and green “M” and its stock ticker in March.
Each transaction in a Bitcoin block can be visualized as a colored square on block explorers, where the color and size of the square correspond to the transaction size and fee rate. Because MARA owns its own mining pool, it has control over what transactions to include in any block it mines and may select less profitable transactions to complete the image.
According to onchain data, MARA earned $443,148 for mining the “Trump 47” block, including $126,148 in fees.
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