MARA Pool Earns 0.85 BTC for Inscribing Video on Bitcoin

A fee of 0.85 BTC, worth $55,250, was paid to bitcoin mining giant Marathon to inscribe a video on a bitcoin transaction.

The transaction, included at block height 848,688 mined by Marathon’s MARA Pool early Thursday UTC, had a size of 3.968 megabytes. According to Mempool, this is the fourth-largest bitcoin transaction ever mined in raw byte terms.

The 56-second video is said to be paying “homage to the builders, artists, and collectors in the Ordinals ecosystem.” Due to the video’s large size, block 848,688 included only three transactions, compared to the usual several thousand.

However, the 0.85 BTC fee for this single transaction compensated MARA Pool for not including other transactions, as the median fee at the time was about $2 per transaction, and the average total transaction fees per block were around 0.2 BTC.

Earlier this year, Marathon launched a service called Slipstream in anticipation of the halving event and a potentially more dynamic fee market afterward.

Through Slipstream, Marathon can include non-standard or large transactions in bitcoin blocks mined by its proprietary solo mining pool for a fee.

Marathon reported an energized hashrate of 29.3 EH/s at the end of May, with the majority directed to MARA Pool, which mined approximately 3.85% of all bitcoin blocks last month.

However, it seems MARA Pool has either encountered bad luck or experienced a decline in hashrate, as the solo pool mined about 3.65% of all bitcoin blocks in the first 19 days of June.