The upcoming Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110) is heading toward a hard activation deadline in early August, but the network’s miners are completely ignoring it. Designed as a “Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork,” the upgrade requires 55% of miners to signal their support to lock in the changes. Right now? That number sits between 0.31% and 0.42%.
Major mining pools are entirely absent from the signaling process. The proposal aims to restrict non-financial data on the blockchain, specifically targeting the recent surge in Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes. To pull this off, BIP-110 strictly caps OP_RETURN sizes to 83 bytes. It also blocks most arbitrary data chunks larger than 256 bytes.
The push to strip this extra data out of the base layer has faced fierce pushback from high-profile industry figures. MicroStrategy executive Michael Saylor strongly condemned the software change. Saylor argued the proposal sets a dangerous precedent by turning a spam dispute into a consensus change that invalidates legitimate, fee-paying transactions.
Because BIP-110 includes a controversial mandatory-signaling fallback, nodes running the new software plan to unilaterally reject non-compliant blocks if miners fail to reach the threshold. This mechanic forces crypto exchanges and wallet operators to hastily plan compliance and readiness reviews ahead of the August block window, according to CryptoSlate. The network is now less than 10,000 blocks away from this activation window.
What a Failed BIP-110 Activation Means for Network Nodes
Industry veterans like Blockstream co-founder Adam Back contrast this current standoff with the historical activation of SegWit. While SegWit eventually achieved overwhelming economic consensus across the industry, BIP-110 lacks a clear mandate from network participants.
Pushing a user-activated soft fork without that economic consensus introduces severe operational risks. If the August deadline passes without a sudden surge in miner support, nodes attempting to enforce the BIP-110 rules will likely fork themselves off the main network. The result is a fractured, irrelevant minority chain that fails to stop the Ordinals transactions it was built to prevent.