Bitcoin's BIP-110, a proposed one-year soft fork that would restrict non-financial data from the blockchain, enters its mandatory signaling window around August 9, 2026, at block height 961,632. Miner support stands at approximately 2.64% of hashrate as of early August, far below the 55% threshol...
"There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam...That precedent is the danger." — Michael Saylor, Founder, MicroStrategy
Bitcoin's BIP-110, a proposed one-year soft fork that would restrict non-financial data from the blockchain, enters its mandatory signaling window around August 9, 2026, at block height 961,632. Miner support stands at approximately 2.64% of hashrate as of early August, far below the 55% threshold required for activation. No major mining pool — including Foundry (23–33% of network hashrate), AntPool, ViaBTC, or F2Pool — has signaled support. The proposal is functionally dead on arrival.
Yet BIP-110's significance extends beyond its activation odds. The nine-month debate has exposed unresolved tensions in Bitcoin's governance model: who decides what constitutes a valid transaction, whether temporary consensus changes are acceptable, and how miners, node operators, and developers negotiate protocol changes in a network designed to resist exactly this kind of top-down intervention. The proposal also raises direct economic questions for miners earning fee revenue from Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens, and Runes — protocols that generated $133.4 million in inscription-related sales in Q1 2026 alone.
BIP-110, formally titled the "Reduced Data Temporary Softfork," was authored by pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm and published on December 5, 2025. It originated as BIP-444 in October 2025 before being reassigned. The proposal introduces seven consensus-level restrictions targeting the most common methods used for embedding arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions:
These limits would make it significantly more expensive to embed images, inscriptions, and token metadata directly on Bitcoin's base layer. The restrictions target Ordinals inscriptions, large OP_RETURN payloads, BRC-20 tokens, and certain Taproot constructions repurposed for data storage. The rules would activate at block 965,664 (projected around September 6, 2026) and expire automatically after 52,416 blocks — approximately one year.
The one-year sunset clause is the proposal's concession to critics who oppose permanent rule changes. According to its author, BIP-110 is framed as a temporary measure to relieve block space pressure while the community debates longer-term solutions.
The data is unambiguous. BIP-110 lacks the miner support to activate.
Signaling began on December 1, 2025, using version bit 4. Barefoot Mining, operating through Ocean Pool (run by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr), mined the first signaling block on March 1, 2026. Since then, cumulative signaling has never exceeded approximately 1% of total hashrate.
Key signaling metrics as of late July 2026:
| Metric | Value | |---|---| | Network hashrate | ~940 EH/s | | Hashrate signaling support (peak) | ~5 EH/s (0.31–0.42%) | | Support as of late July | ~2.64% | | Activation threshold | 55% (1,109 of 2,016 blocks per difficulty period) | | Major pools signaling | None |
Pools that have signaled include Ocean, Roughnecks, SoV, BIP110 Generic, Barefoot Mining, 234 Alberta, Sazmining, and approximately a dozen other small operators. The combined hashrate of all signaling entities is a rounding error against the network's total computational power.
Foundry, AntPool, ViaBTC, F2Pool, and Binance Pool — which collectively control the majority of Bitcoin's hashrate — have not signaled.
Foundry USA, which commands approximately 23–33% of global Bitcoin hashrate (figures vary by measurement period), introduced a novel governance mechanism in response to BIP-110. On July 22, 2026, the pool opened a hashrate-weighted vote asking its customers whether it should signal support.
The voting structure: each miner's ballot is weighted by their average hashrate from July 6–15, 2026. Foundry stated it would only flip its signaling to "Yes" if supporters clear 51% of total participating hashrate. Non-responses default to "No."
On July 21, Foundry published a resource guide with pro and con arguments for BIP-110. The vote closes at block 961,632 — the same block that opens the mandatory signaling window. Results are expected in early August.
This approach is significant regardless of BIP-110's outcome. It represents the first instance of a major mining pool implementing a formal, hashrate-weighted governance vote on a Bitcoin consensus proposal. Whether this becomes a template or an anomaly depends on how the broader mining industry reacts.
BIP-110 targets protocols that generate measurable miner revenue. According to data aggregated by KuCoin Research, Bitcoin Ordinals generated $53 million in sales volume in January 2026, $33.6 million in February, and $46.8 million in March — totaling $133.4 million in Q1 across 59,585 transactions in March alone, involving 14,909 unique buyers and 11,768 sellers.
This represents a significant decline from the peak inscription frenzy of 2024, when the first day of the Runes protocol launch alone generated more than $135 million in transaction fees. The market has normalized into steady, lower-volume activity. But the revenue contribution remains material for miners, particularly since the April 2024 halving cut the block reward to 3.125 BTC, making transaction fees proportionally more important to mining economics.
During active inscription periods, transaction fees have accounted for 5–10% of total block value. BIP-110 would not eliminate this revenue entirely — the proposal restricts specific data methods, not data storage itself — but it would raise the cost of inscription activity substantially, likely suppressing volume.
Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital, characterized BIP-110 as "an extremely disruptive & dangerous response given the tiny impact" — suggesting the revenue at stake does not justify the governance risks the proposal introduces.
Several prominent Bitcoin developers have publicly opposed BIP-110, not on ideological grounds but on technical merit.
Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, called it "a dangerous consensus intervention" and characterized the proposal as "a literal downgrade" that could disrupt existing applications, including edge cases involving Miniscript-compatible wallets. Funds sent to certain output types after activation "could effectively become inaccessible," according to technical analysis cited by Farside Investors.
Jameson Lopp, a Bitcoin developer, described the proposal as "reckless and doomed to fail" in a February 2026 analysis, warning of chain-split potential if enforcement is inconsistent between upgraded and non-upgraded nodes.
Peter Todd demonstrated BIP-110's bypassability by embedding the full text of the BIP itself into a transaction that would comply with BIP-110's rules. The demonstration illustrated that the restrictions target specific storage methods, not the act of data storage. Determined actors can route around the limits at modestly higher cost. The BIP's own specification concedes this point, stating the rules "raise the cost of data storage rather than eliminate it."
Mark "Murch" Erhardt, a BIP editor, publicly criticized the proposal while assigning its designation, stressing that BIP number assignment was "a process decision rather than an endorsement."
Bitcoin Core has not endorsed BIP-110. No implementation has been merged into Bitcoin Core's codebase. The proposal is enforced only by nodes running Bitcoin Knots, a fork maintained by Luke Dashjr.
BIP-110 has become a proxy war for a deeper question: does Bitcoin's consensus mechanism exist to process all valid transactions, or does the community have a right to define what qualifies as a "legitimate" use of block space?
The proposal's supporters, concentrated among Bitcoin Knots users and smaller mining operations, argue that arbitrary data embedding degrades Bitcoin's utility as a payment network. Luke Dashjr has framed the debate in terms of fork mechanics: "Removing rules is a hardfork...Rejecting BIP110 is a contentious hardfork attempt." This framing positions BIP-110's restrictions as the default state and their absence as the deviation — a characterization most of the mining and development community rejects.
Opponents view the proposal through an economic neutrality lens. Saylor's statement — that the "precedent" of restricting transaction types is more dangerous than the behavior BIP-110 targets — captures this position. Adam Back echoed the sentiment: "Bitcoin respectfully says no to what you want." Blockstream's CEO has argued that dissatisfied parties should fork away rather than attempt to modify Bitcoin's consensus rules.
The dispute also surfaces a procedural issue. BIP-110 uses a mandatory signaling window — a mechanism that would reject blocks from miners who do not actively signal bit 4 after block 961,632. In practice, this means the minority of nodes running BIP-110-enforcing software would fork away from the main chain if the proposal fails to reach 55% support. This is not a network-wide fork risk; it is a self-isolation risk for BIP-110 supporters.
Bitcoin Knots, the node implementation that enforces BIP-110, runs on an estimated 22% of reachable Bitcoin nodes, according to Coin Dance. However, this figure is disputed. Critics, including Jameson Lopp, argue that cheap Tor nodes inflate raw counts, making the actual enforcement footprint smaller than headline numbers suggest.
Estimates of BIP-110-capable nodes specifically — nodes running Knots variants configured to enforce the restrictions — range from 2% to 8% of listening nodes. Not all Knots users necessarily enforce BIP-110.
For context, the total reachable node count stands at approximately 23,795 as of mid-2026. Even at the high end, fewer than 1,900 nodes would enforce BIP-110 rules. This is insufficient to create economic pressure on miners or exchanges to comply.
Bitcoin Core v30, released in October 2025, moved in the opposite direction. It increased the default datacarriersize from 83 bytes to 100,000 bytes — a signal that Bitcoin Core's maintainers view data-carrying transactions as legitimate network activity.
The mandatory signaling window opens at block 961,632, estimated to arrive between August 7 and August 9, 2026. From that point, BIP-110-enforcing nodes will reject any block that does not signal version bit 4.
Three scenarios:
1. BIP-110 fails to reach 55% (overwhelmingly likely). The proposal does not activate. Nodes enforcing BIP-110 will fork onto a minority chain, processing only blocks from the small number of signaling miners. This chain would have negligible hashrate and no exchange support. BIP-110 supporters would need to manually abandon the minority chain or continue on it in isolation.
2. BIP-110 reaches 55% (near-impossible given current data). Activation would occur at block 965,664, approximately September 6, 2026. Inscription-heavy transactions would be rejected for one year. Miner fee revenue from Ordinals and related protocols would decline. The restrictions would expire automatically after 52,416 blocks.
3. A separate fork emerges. Paul Sztorc's eCash hard fork proposal, targeting block 964,000 with a planned 1:1 BTC airdrop, runs on a parallel timeline. While distinct from BIP-110, it adds to the governance complexity of August 2026.
Scenario 1 is the near-certain outcome. The question is whether BIP-110-enforcing nodes cause any disruption to the broader network during the mandatory signaling window, or whether they simply fork off quietly.
BIP-110 is a proposal that lost its activation battle months before the mandatory signaling window opened. The data — 2.64% support against a 55% threshold, zero major pool backing, no Bitcoin Core implementation — leaves no ambiguity about the outcome.
Its legacy, however, is procedural. BIP-110 stress-tested Bitcoin's governance mechanisms and found them functioning as designed: the network's high bar for consensus change prevented a minority faction from imposing restrictions that the broader economic majority rejected. Foundry's hashrate-weighted vote introduced a formalized governance tool that may reappear in future proposals. And the debate itself clarified where the Bitcoin community's economic incentives lie — with transaction neutrality over content filtering.
The inscription economy continues. Miners continue to collect fees from it. The consensus rules remain unchanged. That, in Bitcoin's governance framework, is itself the verdict.