GorillaPool turns Bitcoin blocks into collectible art NFTs for miners

BSV mining pool GorillaPool has begun minting unique, collectible NFTs from every block it mines—deterministic generative art pieces created entirely from on-chain data and distributed to pool members.

The BSV-focused pool, which also began mining Teranode blocks on mainnet in December 2025, calls its first collection “Gorilla Canopy.” Each piece is a fractal tree whose shape, color, and style are derived from the block itself. This includes its hash, nonce, merkle root, transaction count, difficulty, timestamp, and even the mining effort required to find it.

There’s a gallery of the images produced here.

“For a long time we’ve wanted to add extra incentives for our hashers to mine with us,” GorillaPool co-founder Michael Boyd told CoinGeek. “We’ve kicked around ideas for a rewards token that could be awarded proportionally to everyone who contributed hashrate towards a GorillaPool block.”

The idea of deterministic art based on block attributes had been kicking around Boyd’s head for years, he said. But implementing it meant either shoehorning features into existing pool software or building something new. And GorillaPool had bigger priorities, such as JungleBus, 1Sat infrastructure, and the various BSV SDKs it supports.

That changed when GorillaPool wrote its own independent pool software, GorillaNode, from scratch. With that foundation in place and the advance of agentic development tools, Boyd said he was able to flesh out the block artwork concept rapidly.

Here’s how it works: When GorillaPool processes a block, the pool’s payout transaction mints a JSON object containing the block’s seed data. An on-chain SVG generator then deterministically produces the artwork from that seed. The result is a 1Sat Ordinals NFT which is transferable, and always reproducible from the same seed and generator script.

“I had a few different art styles I was iterating on,” Boyd said. “The team liked the fractal trees for our first go, because of the distinctive variety that is produced—large blocks with many transactions generate a very different-looking tree than a small block.”

The rarity system adds a gamification layer. A block that took far longer than expected to mine produces a rare Canopy Bloom—finding another block immediately back-to-back mints a Golden Lightning. Setting a new pool record for transaction count, block size, or mining a rare block height number produces a Legendary tier. Mining four or more consecutive blocks (something GorillaPool hasn’t achieved on mainnet since deploying its new pool) would mint an Epic.

Even orphaned blocks, normally a painful loss for any miner, generate an Epic “Ghost” NFT, a spectral tree memorializing what could have been.

“It’s always a sinking feeling when a block gets orphaned,” Boyd said. “But now that generates an Epic rarity unique art piece—value is generated from what was once only a loss.”

For now, the tokens are not available to the general public, and the NFTs are being minted to an internal pool wallet. Boyd said the pool is still working out how to safely distribute them to hashers, who will need wallets that can handle 1Sat Ordinals without blindly spending the UTXO.

“People have asked how to buy them. Currently, they aren’t directly for sale anywhere,” he noted. “Whoever found the winning hash owns the NFT; we just need to work out the details of how to securely receive their NFT wallet address for sending.”

Boyd added that the team is considering a marketplace for the NFTs in the future, and the system is designed to accommodate new art styles and collections down the line. For now, the focus is on getting the distribution mechanism right and giving GorillaPool members something special for their efforts. It’s a permanent, visually striking record of the blocks they helped bring into existence.

Source: https://coingeek.com/gorillapool-turns-bitcoin-blocks-into-collectible-art-nfts-for-miners/