The First Bitcoin Stamp
On March 7, 2023, at block 779,652, mikeinspace created Stamp 0. It's a small piece of laser-eyes pixel art, and it's the genesis of the Bitcoin Stamps protocol.
Stamp 0 wasn't just a picture on the chain. It was a proof of a different idea about where digital art should live.
Why the UTXO set matters
Most on-chain art approaches store data in places a full node can drop later. Witness data can be pruned. Off-chain references can rot when the host goes away. mikeinspace wanted something stronger: art that every full node has to keep, forever, because it's part of the spendable state of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Stamps put the image data into the UTXO set itself. That's the set of unspent transaction outputs every node tracks to know what coins exist. Data stored there can't be pruned away without breaking the node's view of the chain. So a stamp is as permanent as Bitcoin's own accounting.
Block 779,652 is where that guarantee started. Stamp 0 has been carried by every full node since, and it will keep being carried as long as Bitcoin runs.
A movement from one block
The choice at block 779,652 set the tone for everything that followed. Permanence first. No hosts to trust, no pruning to fear, no external dependency that can quietly disappear.
That single decision opened the door to SRC-20 tokens, SRC-101 names, and a whole community of artists and builders who wanted their work to outlast any one platform. KEVIN, the first SRC-20 token, came later in 2023, but it stands on the foundation laid here.
If you want to understand why Bitcoin Stamps works the way it does, start at block 779,652. Everything in the protocol traces back to the moment mikeinspace decided that permanent meant permanent.
Read the full technical spec in the Bitcoin Stamps Whitepaper, and explore the ecosystem at stampchain.io.