An unknown actor issued a Bitcoin transaction Thursday night that embedded the full text of the US Constitution on the blockchain — permanently and without the possibility of removal.
The transaction, which was confirmed at 20:25 UTC on May 28, costing 113,454 satoshis, or about $83.41 in fees, and was processed by mining pool SpiderPool just 14 minutes after it hit the network.
At 44.4 kilobytes, the transaction is far larger than a standard Bitcoin transfer—its bulk comes from the full text of the Constitution, beginning with “We the People of the United States,” written in an OP_RETURN output field and recorded on-chain.
How it worked on Bitcoin
OP_RETURN is a script opcode that allows anyone to attach arbitrary data to a transaction. Outputs marked this way are provably useless – they have no bitcoin value and exist solely to store information. For years, the field was limited to 80 bytes, limiting its use to short hashes, timestamps, and short messages.
That changed with Bitcoin Core v30, released in mid-2025, which removed the byte limit and the one-OP_RETURN-per-transaction rule. The developers behind the change argued that the old cap was counterproductive – users found workarounds anyway, and the restriction created more problems than it solved.
This transaction is one of the first high-profile uses of the new freedom, leveraging the SegWit and Taproot features along with the extended OP_RETURN to fit an entire founding document into a single on-chain record.
Writing data to the blockchain is not a new concept. Projects like OpenTimestamps, DOCPROOF, and Factom spent years anchoring document hashes to the chain as tamper-proof records. Launched in 2023, the Ordinals protocol pushed the practice further by inscribing images, audio and code into the witness data of Taproot transactions. What sets Thursday’s inscription apart is the choice of document — not a hash or a jpeg, it was the United States’ governing charter, written in its entirety.
The inscription arrives during a moment of discussion in the Bitcoin community. BIP-444, a pending proposal, would restore the old OP_RETURN cap of 83 bytes, with backers arguing that unlimited data storage undermines Bitcoin’s identity as a monetary network.
The sender claimed no credit, offered no explanation, and left no traceable identity—just the preamble, seven articles, and 27 amendments, written into a block that every Bitcoin node on the planet now carries.