Bitcoin BIP 110 Softfork Stalls as Miners Reject Deadline

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• BIP 110 reached “Complete” status on June 25, 2026, proposing a one-year restriction on Bitcoin transaction data.
• Miner signaling for the proposal sits at 0.86%, far below the 55% threshold needed for early lock-in.
• Mandatory signaling begins at block 961,632, expected around August 7, with full enforcement targeted for September 1.
• Mining pool Foundry opened an internal vote that could shift the outcome before the deadline arrives.

Bitcoin’s BIP 110 proposal, a one-year softfork that would reimpose strict limits on how much arbitrary data miners can embed inside transactions, advanced to complete status on June 25, 2026. Weekend signaling data puts miner backing at just 0.86%, a fraction of the 55% threshold needed for miners to lock the rule in early and guarantee it takes effect. The shortfall matters less than it might elsewhere in Bitcoin’s governance history, because BIP 110 does not need miner consent to take effect. Its mandatory signaling phase starts automatically at block 961,632, expected around August 7, and full enforcement follows on September 1 regardless of how many miners have opted in by then. Signaling works by having miners mark the blocks they produce to show whether they support the change, similar to a running vote tallied block by block.

A Rule Core Wrote Into Existence Itself

The proposal exists because of a decision Bitcoin Core made months earlier. In late 2025, Core developers removed the historical 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN, a small text field Bitcoin lets users attach to a transaction to store non-payment data, like a short note, an image reference, or a token record, aiming to push data-heavy users toward prunable storage rather than methods that permanently bloat the UTXO set, the ledger of unspent coins every node has to hold. BIP 110 reverses that call and goes further, capping data pushes at 256 bytes and OP_RETURN itself at 83 bytes across seven distinct consensus restrictions new rules that every computer running the Bitcoin software would have to follow. Node-level support runs between 7% and 15%, carried almost entirely by users on Bitcoin Knots rather than Core. Knots has served for years as the client of choice for operators who want tighter limits on which transactions their computer accepts and passes along before miners confirm them, and this fight has turned it into the technical base camp for developers like Luke Dashjr and channels such as Bitcoin University, who treat inscriptions, Ordinals, and Runes as spam bloating storage costs for every full node operator.

None of that miner math is settled, though. Foundry controls between 25% and 30% of global hash rate, and it opened an internal vote over the weekend letting individual rig owners direct their share of the pool’s power toward signaling BIP 110. A meaningful swing from Foundry’s base could pull support well above 0.86% before block 961,632 arrives, though nothing guarantees that happens in time.

Timeline table showing BIP 110 milestones from completion in June through enforcement in September 2026.

The Ordinals Camp Answers With DOG Mode’s Relaxed Rules

Ordinals advocate Leonidas proposed a counter on July 16 and 17: DOG Mode, an alternative Core client that relaxes local relay policy instead of tightening consensus rules, permitting transactions near the full block size and cutting the dust limit to 1 satoshi. Backers say that frees up roughly $25 million in bitcoin that currently sits below the dust limit, the smallest payment size a node will bother forwarding because the fee to move it would cost more than the payment itself. The distinction that matters here is structural. DOG Mode only changes the mempool, the waiting room where unconfirmed transactions sit before a miner picks them up, and the relay policy a node uses to decide what to pass along to other nodes. It leaves the rules for what makes a block valid completely alone. That means DOG Mode needs just one cooperating miner willing to include the relevant transactions, rather than the network-wide agreement BIP 110 requires.

Comparison table of consensus and policy differences between BIP 110 and the DOG Mode alternative client.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back spent the weekend spelling out the downside case. If nodes running BIP 110’s rules start rejecting blocks once mandatory enforcement hits, while miners without majority backing keep mining under the old rules anyway, the network splits into two chains that stop recognizing each other’s blocks. Back called the likely loser a “Pompeii chain,” a minority network frozen at the moment of the split, and mocked BIP 110’s backers on X for failing to line up real financial backing behind the effort.

MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor took the opposing position furthest in a weekend essay titled “110 reasons BIP-110 is a bad idea.” His argument: money cannot distinguish valid transactions from spam by design, and encoding that distinction into consensus hands developers a censorship tool. He warns that tool could later be pointed at privacy features or corporate custody arrangements once the precedent exists. He pairs it with an economic warning – suppressing data-heavy transactions cuts fee demand precisely as block subsidies, the fixed reward miners earn for each block, keep shrinking on a preset schedule, pushing miners to rely more on fees to stay profitable.

Seeking Alpha downgraded its near-term Bitcoin outlook from Strong Buy to Tactical Buy over the weekend, citing governance risk tied to the August deadline rather than any shift in the long-term monetary case. MicroStrategy alone holds 843,775 BTC, and treasury firms in that position value Bitcoin specifically for a rule set that doesn’t move without overwhelming consensus – a softfork activating on sub-1% miner backing, purely because nodes enforce it regardless, is exactly the governance uncertainty that kind of holder has avoided since 2017’s Blocksize Wars. What happens next hinges on Foundry’s vote closing before block 961,632 and on whether Knots adoption grows past its current 7% to 15% share in the weeks remaining.