Blockchain data company Bitquery published a study on September 2 examining four methods of embedding text in Bitcoin across 965,135 blocks. The analysis found 13,062 OP_RETURN taunt transactions that add no spendable state, compared to 96,231 fake-address outputs that persist in the UTXO set. These fake addresses hold approximately 3.2 BTC that is effectively unspendable, as no corresponding private key exists for the embedded text. Bitcoin Core 30.0, released in October 2025, eased propagation of larger OP_RETURN transactions by raising the default data carrier size limit to 100,000 bytes, which may explain the rise in larger messages by February 2026.
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