Foundry Digital, the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool, just handed a major decision directly to its miners. On Friday, July 17, 2026, the company sent an email opening a formal vote on the highly debated BIP-110 soft fork. Foundry controls roughly 34.2% of the global hashrate, meaning whichever way this pool leans will heavily dictate the immediate future of the Bitcoin network.
The proposal, formally known as the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork” (RDTS), is a one-year restriction aimed at cutting off non-financial data protocols like Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes. Proponents argue these protocols clog the network with arbitrary data, while opponents insist they provide essential fee revenue for miners actively securing the chain.
How the Foundry Hashrate Vote Works
The mechanics of the vote are straightforward but carry serious weight. Foundry calculates voting power based on a participant’s 10-day average hashrate. To enforce the outcome, Foundry confirmed that if over 51% of the voting hashrate supports the measure, the pool will signal “Yes” across 100% of the blocks it mines.
If activated, BIP-110 imposes strict technical constraints on what users can write to the blockchain. Authored by developer Dathon Ohm and backed by Ocean pool co-founder Luke Dashjr, the update caps arbitrary data pushes at just 256 bytes. It also restricts new transaction outputs to 34 bytes and restores an older 83-byte limit on OP_RETURN outputs. So far, the miner-activation soft fork window ended with less than 1% support, seeing just 10 blocks signal in favor, according to Bitget.
The UASF Fallback and Chain Split Risks
Because the initial miner signaling fell flat, the network now faces a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) scenario. Between August 7 and August 15, 2026, node operators running the BIP-110 software can choose to enforce these rules independently of the miners. This creates the technical possibility of a minority chain split if the broader community fails to reach consensus.
Major players are already drawing lines in the sand. Pools like AntPool have offered zero support, and F2Pool openly opposes the change. Industry figures including MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor and Blockstream’s Adam Back warned that the fork introduces unnecessary risks and could invalidate perfectly legitimate fee-paying transactions. Currently, almost all early support originates from the Ocean mining pool, reflecting a deep ideological divide over Bitcoin’s monetary purity versus open data usage.
What the BIP-110 Standoff Means for Bitcoin Governance
This escalating standoff is drawing direct comparisons to the historic blocksize war that fractured the community from 2015 to 2017. However, the stakes here center entirely on censorship resistance and protocol neutrality rather than block capacity. If BIP-110 activates, it will enact the strictest limitation on Bitcoin script since Satoshi Nakamoto deactivated multiple opcodes back in 2010 to patch the CVE-2010-5137 vulnerability.
The core takeaway for the industry is that the financial incentive structures of Bitcoin are clashing directly with developer ideology. By attempting to filter out Ordinals and Runes traffic, BIP-110 forces miners to choose between preserving the network’s original payment-focused design and accepting the lucrative transaction fees generated by new data protocols. Foundry’s decision to democratize the pool’s signal puts that exact financial choice directly into the hands of the individual hash producers.