Bitcoin Blockchain Splits into Two Competing Versions
On March 24, 2026, two major Bitcoin mining pools, Antpool and Foundry USA, found blocks 941,881 at almost the same time. Foundry's block was discovered just 12 seconds after Antpool's. This led to a rare event where the blockchain split into two competing versions of history until one pool mined six blocks in a row to force a resolution.
Bitcoin mining is a decentralized process with no centralized authority monitoring it in real-time. When a new block is found, it takes time for its existence to propagate across the global network. If another miner finds a valid block before the previous one has finished spreading, they build on their own version of the chain and broadcast their competing block.
The network resolves this by allowing whichever chain accumulates more proof-of-work to become the dominant branch, discarding the other as 'orphaned' or 'stale.' This means that the transactions within the orphaned blocks are dropped back into the mempool to be confirmed again in a future block.