Miners Boycott BIP-110 Chain, Temporarily Splitting Bitcoin Blockchain
A proposed Bitcoin soft fork called BIP-110 has resulted in a temporary split of the blockchain, but it appears that miners are boycotting the enforcing chain. The proposal aims to restrict certain uses of arbitrary data in transactions and requires signaling from nodes for its deployment. However, as of August 9th at 6:34 UTC, only two blocks had been produced on the BIP-110 enforcing branch, which is roughly eight hours behind the dominant proof-of-work chain.
The split occurred when nodes began rejecting blocks that did not set version bit 4, and miners using OCEAN produced the first two blocks on the BIP-110 enforcing branch. However, since then, no further blocks have been produced, leaving the enforcing nodes isolated from the rest of the network.
The dominant chain has continued to advance, with 1,957 blocks remaining in the mandatory-signaling window for BIP-110. The outcome of this split is still uncertain, but it appears that miners are not supporting the enforcing chain.