BlackRock Receives White & Black Rocks

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BlackRock’s IBIT Bitcoin ETF wallet (bc1q8) just received a White Rock inscription, just a day after receiving a Black Rock inscription the day before. An inscription is a piece of metadata inscribed onto Bitcoin satoshis (sats), the smallest units of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. These inscriptions allow each sat to hold data such as text and even images, of up to 4MB in size. This has made inscriptions the de facto format for NFTs on the Bitcoin network, which have now been termed as Ordinals.

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This specific activity highlights the unique, permissionless nature of blockchain technology. Unlike traditional banking systems where transfers can be scrutinized or rejected before settlement, public cryptocurrency addresses cannot decline incoming transactions. This means that high-profile entities often become involuntary custodians of these digital artifacts, as the sender requires only the public address to execute the transfer.

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Since the reveal of BlackRock and the respective ETF providers’ public wallet addresses by Arkham, individuals and projects alike have begun using these public wallets as a form of publicity, through depositing their project tokens or NFTs into their wallets, or just as a joke. The main recipient of these tokens so far has been BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund wallet (0x13e), which has since seen over a hundred different meme tokens including popular Ethereum memecoins, MOG and PEPE, and even a ROCK memecoin deposited, possibly in the hopes of attracting more attention to these tokens. An Ethereum user (reltor.eth) had even sent 0.974ETH to the wallet, via the sanctioned cryptocurrency mixer service, Tornado Cash.

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For the senders, this tactic serves as a low-cost form of "on-chain advertising." By targeting wallets known to be under constant surveillance by analysts and trading bots, these projects attempt to bypass traditional marketing channels. The goal is often to generate curiosity among the thousands of observers tracking institutional movements, hoping that the association with a financial giant will lend legitimacy or virality to their specific token or collection.