Bitcoin has now experienced the chain split that critics of BIP-110 had warned could occur if the controversial proposal reached its signaling phase without meaningful support from miners.
The split occurred at block 961,632, according to data from the BIP-110 monitoring infrastructure cited by Bitcoin commentators.
The BIP-110 branch has rapidly fallen behind the main Bitcoin network, and it is currently struggling to produce blocks.
At press time, the standard Bitcoin chain had reached block 961,681, while a BIP-110-enforcing node was sitting at block 961,633, according to the monitoring data. That put the BIP-110 branch 48 blocks behind the standard chain.
Bitcoin’s normal block-production target is approximately one block every 10 minutes. The BIP-110 branch, by contrast, was producing blocks at an average interval of about 6.9 hours.
The overwhelming majority of Bitcoin’s mining power has continued extending the conventional.
The reaction from Blockstream CEO and longtime Bitcoin developer Adam Back was sarcastic and dismissive. “They forked off and found out,” Back wrote.
Earlier, Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of BTC treasury giant Strategy, warned that the fork would stall into irrelevance.
“With only 2.6% miner signaling, BIP-110 has failed to earn broad miner support,” Saylor wrote on X. “At block 961,632, its nodes will reject non-signaling blocks. BIP-110 will then stall or fork into irrelevance while Bitcoin continues normally. Bitcoin is working as designed.”
BIP-110 is meant to restrict the amount and types of arbitrary non-financial data that can be embedded in Bitcoin transactions.
The proposal was authored under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm, with Luke Dashjr, a longtime Bitcoin developer and maintainer associated with Bitcoin Knots, being its main cheerleader.
Its supporters argue that Bitcoin was designed as a peer-to-peer monetary system, so it does not have to function as a general-purpose data-storage system.
However, Bitcoin Core developers argued that restrictive policies were ineffective because data could find alternative routes into blocks. In 2025, Bitcoin Core 30 moved toward a dramatically higher default OP_RETURN limit, with the key limit increasing from 83 bytes to 100,000 bytes.
Dashjr remains defiant
Luke Dashjr remains defiant, recently rejecting claims that BIP-110 has failed.
Dashjr accused opponents of deliberately misrepresenting the situation and urged supporters to ignore the “lies.”
“Bad actors are once again spreading lies about BIP110’s death,” Dashjr wrote. “BIP110 has NOT failed. Do not give in to their gaslighting.”
Dashjr acknowledged that the BIP-110 chain was producing blocks more slowly, but he claims that the problem is tolerable. “Not really. Blocks are slower, but that’s tolerable,” he wrote.
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