The BIP-110 Bitcoin Fork That Mined Two Blocks and Died: What Happened on August 9, 2026

Technical Mechanism

BIP-110, formally the "Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork," proposed a one-year restriction on arbitrary data embedding in Bitcoin transactions. It specifically targeted:

• Ordinals inscriptions
• Oversized OP_RETURN payloads
• BRC-20 token data
• Repurposed Taproot data storage

The proposal was designed as a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) — it relied on node enforcement rather than miner hashpower majority . The mandatory signaling window ran from block 961,632 to 963,647. To lock in, BIP-110 required 55% of blocks (1,109 of 2,016) to signal support within a single difficulty retarget period, with activation at block 965,664 . If activated, restrictions would expire automatically after 52,416 blocks (roughly one year) .

Miner Support: Almost Zero

BIP-110 never achieved meaningful miner buy-in. The numbers tell the story clearly:

On August 1, 2026 — over a week before the split — on-chain tracking service Farside UK declared BIP-110 "mathematically finished," stating it could never reach its 55% threshold .

Network Impact

The split was brief and one-sided:

• The main chain advanced from 961,632 to 961,690 while the fork stayed at 961,633 — a 57-block gap .
• Only two blocks were mined on the forked chain in over eight hours .
• A "silent miner boycott" effectively halted the enforcing chain, as miners refused to build on the minority branch .
• 99.85% of hashpower remained on the original chain .

Opposing Arguments

BIP-110 was highly divisive, with criticism centering on several key points:

• Permissionless innovation: Opponents argued that banning Ordinals and inscriptions violated Bitcoin's ethos of permissionless use .
• Economic consensus override: Critics said that using a UASF with negligible miner support was an end-run around the normal Bitcoin improvement process .
• Censorship precedent: Restricting transaction data types at the consensus level could set a dangerous precedent for future content-based censorship .
• No community consensus: The proposal was "not an approved Bitcoin upgrade," and prominent figures like Adam Back and Jameson Lopp warned of chain-split risks .

Price Reaction

Available reports do not detail a specific BTC price crash. The event was widely anticipated and the fork's failure was essentially preordained, so broader market impact appears to have been minimal. The most significant market reaction may have been the collapse in value of Ordinals-related assets and BRC-20 tokens on the forked chain, though specific price data is not covered in available sources.

Prospects for the Minority Chain

The minority chain has effectively no viable future:

• Two blocks total — no sustained mining activity .
• 0.15% of network hashpower is far below the threshold needed to secure any blockchain against reorganization attacks .
• Major exchanges had warned about replay attack risks and were unlikely to support the chain .
• The fork was described as "dead on arrival," "dying with a whimper," and "BIP-110 forking itself into oblivion" .
• Without a significant and sustained miner migration (which never materialized), the fork chain cannot produce blocks at a regular cadence and is functionally dead .