In a dramatic test of Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism, the BIP-110 soft fork attempt collapsed after mustering less than 2.53% of the network’s total hashpower. The fork, initiated at block height 961,632 on August 8, 2026, sought to impose temporary restrictions on arbitrary data like Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, but was ultimately overwhelmed by the dominant chain.
Michael Saylor confirmed via a tweet that approximately 99.85% of Bitcoin’s hashpower remained with the original chain, leaving the BIP-110 minority chain stranded. The breakaway chain managed to produce only two blocks before stalling, with average block times ballooning to roughly 6.9 hours due to a coincidental 0.99% difficulty increase. In contrast, the main network continued its regular ten-minute block rhythm, pulling dozens of blocks ahead within hours.
The fork was triggered when Antpool mined block 961,632 without signaling support via version bit 4, a requirement enforced by BIP-110’s User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) design. BIP-110 nodes, primarily running Bitcoin Knots software, rejected that block and instead built on a compliant version mined by the small Roughnecks group through the Ocean pool. However, with only a fraction of the hashrate, the minority chain quickly froze.
Saylor had predicted the outcome days earlier, noting the low signaling rate and declaring, “Bitcoin is working as designed.” Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, was more blunt: “They forked off and found out.” Luke Dashjr, maintainer of Bitcoin Knots and a key BIP-110 supporter, conceded the stalls but labeled them “tolerable,” while urging users to upgrade to avoid replay risks and potential “counterfeit coins.”
Despite the network split, the Bitcoin price barely registered the event, trading around $64,928 with a 3.06% weekly gain. The episode underscored the network’s immense resilience and the near-impossible task of forcing protocol changes without overwhelming mining consensus. The main network’s OP_RETURN data limit remains at 100,000 bytes, unchanged, while some minority chain supporters now discuss altering the proof-of-work algorithm to keep the chain alive—a move that would turn it into a separate asset rather than a Bitcoin fork.
