Bitcoin Rejects BIP-110 Soft Fork as Ordinals Dominate 67% of Transactions
What You Need to Know
- BIP-110 soft fork proposal pulled before implementation due to insufficient network support and consensus.
- Fewer than 10% of nodes and zero top mining pools backed the Bitcoin transaction limit proposal.
- Ordinals and runes comprise over 67% of Bitcoin transactions, creating ongoing network data congestion issues.
- Bitcoin Knots alternative client reached nearly 25% of nodes, representing philosophical divide over data limits.
David Bailey, the founder of Nakamoto, announced that BIP-110, a proposed soft fork that would have imposed strict new limits on Bitcoin transaction data, has been pulled before it could go live. Bailey framed the cancellation as a win, calling it “incredibly bullish for Bitcoin” while simultaneously accusing the campaign against it of being a “hostile takeover attempt,” which is a notable combination of triumphalism and grievance from someone on the winning side.
The proposal, introduced in December 2025 by developer Dathon Ohm, never came close to the consensus Bitcoin governance actually requires. By February, fewer than 10% of nodes signaled support and none of the top 20 mining pools backed it. That is not a close call. Bitcoin’s upgrade mechanism is deliberately slow and adversarial by design, a lesson absorbed after the 2017 SegWit2x saga, when a miner-backed block size increase collapsed at the last minute because node operators simply refused to follow. BIP-110 traced a similar arc: technically motivated, politically divisive, and ultimately unable to survive contact with the network’s distributed veto structure. BitMEX Research’s warning that the changes could break wallets and cause fund losses almost certainly accelerated the retreat.
Ordinals and runes now account for more than 67% of Bitcoin network transactions, which means the data congestion problem BIP-110 tried to solve is not going away.
The cancellation reduces the immediate risk of a chain split, but it does not resolve the underlying tension. Bitcoin Knots, an alternative client that reimposed data limits after a 2024 software update removed them, had grown to nearly a quarter of all nodes by February. That is a meaningful fork in network philosophy, even without a fork in the chain. If ordinals-driven fee pressure continues, or if regulators begin scrutinizing Bitcoin’s use as a data layer rather than purely as a monetary network, the pressure to revisit data restrictions will return, probably in a form that learns from BIP-110’s failure to build miner support before going public. The debate has not been settled. It has been postponed.
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