Image Credit: Shutterstock
Key Takeaways
- BIP-110 forked from Bitcoin with only 2.53% miner support and produced just two blocks in eight hours.
- Inherited difficulty leaves the minority chain moving too slowly to reach a timely adjustment.
- Replay risk means transactions on the fork can also spend real BTC on the main chain.
As of around 6 a.m. UTC Sunday, the minority chain created when BIP-110 supporters split from Bitcoin on Saturday had produced just two blocks in roughly eight hours, with no clear sign of sustained miner participation. Bitcoin’s main chain advanced 48 blocks over the same period.
BIP-110 Splits at Block 961,632 With 2.53% Support
The fork occurred at block 961,632, when nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that did not signal support for the proposal using version bit 4. Mandatory signaling started around 19:35 UTC Saturday.
Only 2.53% of blocks signaled for BIP-110 over the preceding two weeks, against the 55% threshold needed to activate it without a split. Ocean Pool has produced the majority of signaling blocks since they first appeared in March 2026.
AntPool mined the first non-signaling block at that height. The rest of the network accepted it and BIP-110 nodes rejected it, while a miner using Ocean produced the alternative block the breakaway chain followed instead.
Inherited Difficulty Leaves the Fork Far From an Adjustment
Bitcoin recalculates mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks to keep blocks arriving roughly every ten minutes. The breakaway chain inherited the main network’s current difficulty setting while attracting only a fraction of its hash power.
That leaves blocks arriving hours apart. The chain cannot lower its difficulty until it completes 2,016 blocks at that pace. At the observed rate, monitoring data earlier put the next adjustment roughly 350 days away, versus about 14 days for Bitcoin.
The two-week window in which BIP-110 nodes demand every block signal support runs to block 963,647. At the current pace, the chain will not come close.
Sellers Risk Losing BTC When Moving BIP-110 Fork Coins
Both chains still accept the same transactions, which creates a specific hazard for anyone trying to sell fork coins. A signed transaction sending fork coins also works on Bitcoin, so a buyer can rebroadcast it on the main chain and collect real BTC from the same seller.
The slow block times make that trade worse rather than better, since a chain producing one block every several hours takes hours to confirm anything sold on it.
BIP-110 Sought One-Year Limits on Inscription Data
BIP-110, formally titled Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, sought a one-year restriction on storing images, text, and other non-financial data inside Bitcoin transactions.
Its rules would have capped most new outputs at 34 bytes, OP_RETURN at 83 bytes and data pushes at 256 bytes, targeting the techniques behind Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens and Runes.
Supporters argued the practice clogs the network with material unrelated to payments and raises costs for people sending money. Opponents countered that anyone paying the transaction fee has bought the right to use that space however they choose, and that miners and node operators should not decide which transactions count as legitimate.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back, Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp and Strategy chairman Michael Saylor all criticized the proposal ahead of the split. Saylor wrote that unless major miners reversed course, Bitcoin would continue normally while BIP-110 stalled or forked into irrelevance.
