BIP-110 Fork Fails to Gain Traction at Two Blocks

The BIP-110 fork, which aimed to cap arbitrary data in transactions for roughly a year, has stalled at two blocks. The proposal entered its mandatory signaling window on Saturday, but nodes running BIP-110 software rejected any block that failed to signal support through version bit 4. The first block at the required height arrived without the signal, causing those nodes to reject it and peel away onto a separate chain.

The mining group Roughnecks produced both BIP-110 blocks using Ocean's DATUM protocol but stopped after two attempts. By Sunday afternoon, the enforcing branch remained stuck at 961,633 while Bitcoin's dominant chain had advanced to 961,744, a gap of 111 blocks and roughly 17 hours without a new block on the fork.

The proposal failed to gain sufficient support, with only 51 out of 2,016 blocks in the preceding difficulty period signaling for it. This is below the 55% threshold needed for voluntary lock-in. Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment compounds the problem, as the fork inherits the main chain's difficulty but commands a negligible share of hashpower.

Michael Saylor and Adam Back opposed BIP-110 publicly, arguing that its activation method invited exactly this outcome. Ocean, which supported the proposal, informed clients that some miners using their Stratum templates may have believed they were mining on Bitcoin while their hashrate was directed to the new chain. The company will reimburse affected miners for rewards they would have earned on the non-BIP-110 chain during that window.