BIP-110 Fork Hits Roadblock After Stalling at Two Blocks

The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110 fork appears to have stalled at block height 961,632 after only two blocks were produced on the new chain. The proposal aimed to cap arbitrary data in transactions for roughly a year, targeting Ordinals inscriptions and oversized OP_RETURN payloads. However, it lacked sufficient support from miners, with only 51 of the 2,016 blocks in the preceding difficulty period signaling for the proposal, far short of the 55% threshold needed for voluntary lock-in.

Despite some mining companies supporting BIP-110, including Ocean, which used its DATUM protocol to produce the two blocks, the fork has made little progress. The main chain had already advanced to block height 961,744 by Sunday afternoon, a gap of 111 blocks and roughly 17 hours without a new block on the fork.

Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment compounds the problem for BIP-110, as it inherited the main chain's difficulty but commands a negligible share of hashpower. This means that mining on the BIP-110 chain is currently less profitable than staying on the main chain, making it difficult to attract more miners and complete the fork.

Some critics, including Michael Saylor, had publicly opposed BIP-110 due to concerns over its activation method. Saylor wrote that Bitcoin had worked as designed, putting 99.85% of hashpower on the main chain. Ocean has also informed clients that some miners may have unknowingly had their hashrate directed to the new BIP-110 chain while thinking they were mining on Bitcoin.