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Key Takeaways
- Leonidas proposed DOG Mode, an open-source Bitcoin client that would loosen relay policy limits rather than change consensus rules.
- BIP 110, a rival anti-spam proposal, has never cleared roughly 1% in miner signaling support and stood at zero as of mid-July.
- DOG Mode would raise the max standard transaction size and lower the dust limit, potentially freeing an estimated $25 million in padding for Ordinals and Runes.
Leonidas, co-founder of the Runestone project and a leading advocate for Bitcoin’s Ordinals and Runes ecosystem, announced on X on July 17 that he is starting an open-source Bitcoin client called DOG Mode. The proposal would loosen two of Bitcoin Core’s relay policy limits rather than change the network’s consensus rules, offering a path around BIP 110, a rival proposal to restrict non-financial data that has drawn almost no miner support.
A Different Path Around a Stalled Vote
BIP 110 is a user-activated soft fork that would need support from 55% of Bitcoin’s mining hash rate to take effect. According to the BIP 110 monitor, a site tracking miner signaling, support has never cleared roughly 1% in any signaling period and stood at zero as of mid-July. Because BIP 110 would alter Bitcoin’s consensus rules, the network’s core validation logic, it needs that supermajority to activate and cannot proceed without it.
DOG Mode works differently. Relay policy governs which transactions an individual node chooses to pass along to its peers, separate from the harder consensus rules that determine whether a block is valid at all. Bitcoin Core, the software the large majority of Bitcoin nodes run, currently declines to relay certain transactions it considers non-standard even when they are valid under consensus. Because DOG Mode would only change what participating nodes forward, it needs no network-wide vote. If enough nodes adopt it and even a single miner agrees to include the transactions it carries, those transactions can still confirm on the Bitcoin blockchain.
What DOG Mode Would Change
The proposal would raise the maximum standard transaction size Core relays from 400,000 weight units to 3.9 million, close to the 4 million weight units a full Bitcoin block can hold. It would also lower the dust limit, the minimum size of a transaction output that nodes consider worth relaying, from the current 294-to-546 satoshi range down to a single satoshi.
Ordinals, which embed images and text directly into Bitcoin transactions, and Runes, which issue tradeable tokens on the network, both currently have to pad their transaction outputs with extra bitcoin to clear that dust threshold. Leonidas said removing the floor would free an estimated $25 million in padding currently locked in those ecosystems.
Two Camps, Two Alternative Clients
The dispute over Bitcoin’s data limits has, in recent months, played out largely through competing software rather than through Bitcoin’s formal governance process. BIP 110′s limited support comes almost entirely from Bitcoin Knots, the longstanding alternative client favored by developers who want to restrict non-financial data on the network. DOG Mode would function as a mirror-image fork of Bitcoin Core aimed at the opposite goal, though Leonidas has said it would diverge from Core’s codebase far less than Knots does.
Prominent Bitcoin figures including Michael Saylor and Adam Back have separately criticized the BIP 110 proposal. In his announcement, Leonidas argued that Bitcoin Core and Knots have “spent years enforcing rules that Bitcoin itself does not have,” and said sustained adoption of DOG Mode could eventually pressure Core to loosen its own relay restrictions.
Still Just an Announcement, Not Code
As of Friday, DOG Mode existed only as a proposal. Leonidas has not published a code repository, version, or performance benchmark. He has instead asked other developers to help build an initial release, miners to signal support, and users to help promote the initiative online. DOG, the Runestone-linked token whose ecosystem stands to benefit from a lower dust limit, was little changed following the announcement, trading down about 1.2% over 24 hours.
