BIP-110 Bitcoin Fork Stalls After Producing Just Two Blocks in Eight Hours

The BIP-110 fork diverged from Bitcoin's main chain at block 961,632 when nodes rejected a block lacking the proposal's required signaling. Within eight hours, the breakaway chain had advanced to block 961,633 while Bitcoin reached 961,681, leaving the fork severely lagging behind.

The split occurred after AntPool mined a block without signaling support for BIP-110, which standard Bitcoin nodes accepted but fork nodes rejected. A miner using OCEAN subsequently produced a signaling block, creating the alternative branch. The fork's minority chain now faces a critical problem: it inherited Bitcoin's mining difficulty despite attracting only a fraction of the network's total hashpower. At the current pace of block production, the chain would require roughly 350 days to reach its next difficulty adjustment, compared with about two weeks on the main network.

Miner signaling for BIP-110 has remained sparse. In the previous 2,016-block period, only 51 blocks backed the proposal—representing 2.53% support. The proposal requires 1,109 signaling blocks, or 55%, to trigger its activation threshold. Before the split, support was far below this level.

BIP-110 proposes restricting non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions for approximately one year, targeting images, text, Ordinals inscriptions, and other arbitrary content. Proponents argue this preserves block space for payment users, while opponents contend that fee-paying users should decide how they use available space and reject consensus rules that classify certain valid transactions as less legitimate.