Marathon's MARA Pool Earns $55,250 Fee for Inscribing Video on Bitcoin Blockchain

The fee as shown on mempool.space Source

Bitcoin mining giant Marathon earned a significant fee of 0.85 BTC, equivalent to $55,250, for inscribing a video onto a bitcoin transaction. This transaction, included at block height 848,688 and mined by Marathon's MARA Pool early Thursday (UTC), is notable for its size—3.968 megabytes—making it the fourth-largest bitcoin transaction ever mined in raw byte terms, according to data from Mempool.

Transaction Details

The 56-second video pays homage to the builders, artists, and collectors within the Ordinals ecosystem. Due to its large size, block 848,688 included only three transactions, as opposed to the usual several thousand transactions typically processed in a single block. The substantial 0.85 BTC fee for this single transaction adequately compensated MARA Pool for the opportunity cost of excluding other transactions. At the time, the median fee per transaction was about $2, and the average total transaction fees per block were approximately 0.2 BTC.

Marathon’s Slipstream Service

Earlier this year, Marathon launched Slipstream, a service designed to anticipate a more dynamic fee market following the bitcoin halving event. Slipstream allows Marathon to include non-standard or large transactions in the bitcoin blocks mined by its proprietary solo mining pool, for a fee. This service is a strategic move to capitalize on the evolving fee market dynamics.

MARA Pool’s Performance

As of the end of May, Marathon reported an energized hashrate of 29.3 exahashes per second (EH/s), with the majority directed to MARA Pool, which mined about 3.85% of all bitcoin blocks last month. However, MARA Pool's performance has seen a slight decline or potential bad luck, mining approximately 3.65% of all bitcoin blocks in the first 19 days of June.