MARA Holdings, one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies, inscribed the full text of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights into Bitcoin block 879,613 on January 17, 2025. The company used its mining pool to embed the documents directly, framing the move as a preservation of “America’s eternal principles” on the most censorship-resistant network humans have ever built.

How you carve text into a blockchain

Since 2023, a protocol called Ordinals has let people inscribe arbitrary data directly onto individual satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin. Each inscription gets a sequential number, creating a permanent, on-chain record that can’t be edited, deleted, or censored.

The Constitution wasn’t even the first time someone had this idea. The earliest known inscription of the document was Ordinals inscription #1893, which recorded the full text of the Constitution not long after the protocol launched. At least 13 additional inscriptions of the document followed that initial one.

What made MARA’s version different was the method. Rather than using the standard Ordinals inscription process that any user can access, MARA leveraged its position as a miner to embed the documents directly into a block it produced.

What this means for investors

The inscription of the Constitution didn’t move Bitcoin’s price. No new tokens were created.

The Ordinals protocol has already demonstrated that demand for non-financial block space is real. Since launching in 2023, it has generated meaningful fee revenue for miners during periods of high inscription activity. More demand for block space means higher transaction fees, which directly benefits miners like MARA. It also strengthens the network’s long-term security model as Bitcoin’s block subsidy continues to halve roughly every four years.