Bitcoin BIP-110 Fork Halts After Two Blocks, Lacks Sufficient Support

The highly debated BIP-110 software proposal, aiming to restrict non-financial data on the Bitcoin network, led to a chain split at block height 961,632 on August 9, 2026. However, this contentious breakaway chain managed to produce only two blocks before its mining activities came to a halt. This outcome clearly demonstrated the proposal's failure to garner adequate support from the main network.

BIP-110, formally known as the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork (RDTS), sought to temporarily limit the amount of arbitrary non-financial data—such as Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and similar payloads—within Bitcoin transactions for approximately one year. Proponents argued that this measure was necessary to protect Bitcoin's role as 'sound money,' reduce blockchain bloat, lower storage and bandwidth costs for node operators, and refocus development on monetary use cases. Conversely, critics viewed the proposal as a form of censorship, contrary to Bitcoin's open and permissionless nature, and warned that it could set a dangerous precedent.

For the proposal to activate, miners needed to signal their support in 55% of blocks within a 2,016-block period. However, miner support for BIP-110 remained consistently low, hovering between 2.53% and 2.7% during the signaling window. This was significantly below the required 55% threshold. As the voluntary signaling threshold was not met, nodes enforcing BIP-110 began rejecting non-signaling blocks at block height 961,632, triggering the chain split. The mining pool Roughnecks, which had supported BIP-110, subsequently announced that it had ceased its mining operations under the Roughnecks name and advised miners to pause their activities on the current algorithm.

Following the split, the main Bitcoin chain continued to produce blocks normally, while the BIP-110 chain fell significantly behind. Despite inheriting Bitcoin's existing mining difficulty, the breakaway chain possessed only a minimal share of hash power, causing block production times to stretch for hours. This resulted in the rapid progression of the main chain and the practical incapacitation of the BIP-110 chain. Market observers noted that despite the risk of this contentious fork, the direct impact on Bitcoin (BTC) price remained limited. Some experts issued warnings regarding the risk of replay attacks for users attempting to sell forked coins without proper separation.

The BIP-110 event underscored the deep divisions within the Bitcoin community concerning block space utilization and the network's fundamental purpose. Unlike previous forks, such as Bitcoin Cash, which emerged with substantial miner and user backing, BIP-110's swift failure demonstrated that such radical changes require broad consensus to gain traction. Bitcoin's decentralized structure allows a minority group to form a new chain in such scenarios, but this event highlighted the network's overall resilience and the dominance of the main chain.

Analysts and market expectations suggest that the rapid cessation of the BIP-110 fork indicates a strong commitment to Bitcoin's current core principles. It is believed that future proposals for similar data restrictions or protocol changes are unlikely to succeed without much broader consensus among miners and node operators. This event has once again underscored the critical importance of user and miner support in Bitcoin's technical evolution.