In about two weeks, an unidentified sender has put one 13-word poem on the Bitcoin blockchain 26 separate times. Who they are and what they want is a mystery.
The repeating text was flagged by Galaxy Research, which is the research arm of crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital. Every copy reads the same:
“thoughtless quartz clocks drift / blocks stack each a strict proof / timechain keeps score”
The poem is a haiku about how Bitcoin keeps time. Its author has also stuck to a fairly steady timetable.
Too big for the old limit
On Oct. 24, Galaxy Research shared what it found in a post on X. According to the team, the mystery sender has been slipping the text into regular Bitcoin transactions.
Every copy is stored in a 103-byte OP_RETURN output. Bitcoin’s previous default relay limit was 83 bytes, so under the old default these messages would not have fit.
There’s a second poem too. Galaxy Research traced two posts of a different poem to the same cryptographic keys, which puts the count at 28 messages in just 12 days.
Funds that loop back
Galaxy Research thinks traditional money laundering is an unlikely explanation. The money simply travels back and forth between the sender and a custodial service.
By the researchers’ count, there were 28 deposits and 14 round trips. Mining fees across the whole set came to only 8,015 satoshis. The service also took a single 100k satoshi deduction on Oct. 19.
So the activity is heavy, nearly free, and apparently makes no money. That pattern suggests something running on repeat.
Three possible explanations
Galaxy Research put forward several ideas. One is that the sender wants to inflate deposit metrics or transaction volume for a custodial platform.
Another is an automated integration test left running in production, with a developer’s test script writing to the live chain.
The oddest option: someone may have handed an autonomous AI agent a Bitcoin wallet and told it to make transactions.
None of these could be confirmed, the researchers said. Nobody knows yet why the sender is doing it.
Watching for copy 27
Timing is the one thing Galaxy Research believes it can forecast. Should the pattern continue, the 27th copy of the poem is due roughly 14 hours after the 26th.
An on-time arrival would add to the case that an automated process is behind it. For now, the sender’s identity and the reason for the transactions remain unknown.