'XMR20' spends ~0.6 XMR block reward to inject ~598 KB music video in Monero blockchain

XMR20¹ project has seemingly embedded a 21-second MP4 music video² in the Monero blockchain earlier today, after reportedly mining the largest XMR transaction³ recorded to date (599,000 bytes) in block 3799494⁴:

We just made Monero history [..] 598,945 bytes of that transaction sit in tx_extra, a field Monero nodes relay only up to 1,060 bytes; At 565 times the limit, it could never pass through the mempool. So we built it into the block’s own coinbase transaction and mined block 3,799,494 ourselves [..] The pool has stopped mining for now; the block stays.⁵

The block was automatically penalised and the miner only received ~0.00399 XMR instead of the default ~0.6 XMR block reward, due to the ~1 KB tx_extra maximum size limit that was implemented to mitigate damage done by Mordinals/NFTs in 2023⁶.

Consult the previous Monero Observer reports⁷ to learn more about this story.

This is an ongoing story and the report will be updated when new information is available.