Bitcoin BIP-110 soft fork fails as support stalls below 55%

Bitcoin's BIP-110 soft fork failed to reach the 55 percent activation threshold, with miner support peaking at just 1.2 percent of blocks, Farside UK said.

"BIP-110 has now failed to reach a 55 percent threshold and can never reach such a threshold," Farside UK said on X. "BIP-110 failed and it will now spin off."

The proposal, submitted by developer Dathon Ohm in late 2025, sought to ban for one year the recording of images, text and other non-payment data on the Bitcoin blockchain. It introduced seven temporary consensus changes, including limits on witness elements and control block size, plus a ban on executable OP_IF and OP_NOTIF instructions in Tapscript. Support peaked at 23 blocks in difficulty period #475, far below the 1,109 required for activation. Over eight months, the support signal never exceeded 1.5 percent of new blocks, according to the BIP-110 Monitor.

The failure follows months of opposition from Michael Saylor, Adam Back and Samson Mow, who argued the soft fork would set a precedent for censoring fee-paying transactions. Saylor published 110 objections, warning the proposal attacks Bitcoin's "constitution." "Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory," he wrote on X. Back, chief executive of Blockstream, called the campaign "idiocracy" and said miners should not flip the activation bit. Mow, head of JAN3, outlined a "1 percent attack" scenario in which a small share of hash rate and nodes could force the change.

The proposal's activation design drew particular scrutiny. BIP-110 lowered the threshold from the standard 95 percent to 55 percent and removed the FAILED state, allowing forced activation by node operators. A researcher known as Dathon Pwn found an activation bug that could lead to chain splits when nodes upgrade retroactively. Opponents also showed the restrictions could be bypassed: Slovak developer Martin Habovštiak embedded a 66 KB image in a Bitcoin transaction without OP_RETURN or Taproot, undercutting the anti-spam rationale.

Support was concentrated among node operators rather than miners. The share of Bitcoin Knots nodes grew to between 8 percent and more than 20 percent of publicly reachable nodes, while the largest pools — AntPool, Foundry, F2Pool and ViaBTC — submitted no signals. Foundry, which controls more than 22 percent of network hash rate, opened a client vote on July 21 but did not disclose results.

The failed fork leaves Bitcoin's data policy unchanged. Saylor's Strategy joined nine companies, including Blockstream, BlackRock, Coinbase and Fidelity Digital Assets, in launching the Bitcoin Security Consortium on July 23, pledging $15 million over three years to fund development without interfering in protocol rules. Bitcoin traded at $64,529, up 1.7 percent over 24 hours, as of 09:22 UTC.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.