BTC fork BIP-110 branch stalls quickly

TLDR

Bitcoins new BIP-110-enforcing forked branch has stalled after mining only two blocks, while the main Bitcoin (BTC) chain continues unaffected.

1. The BIP-110 branch split from Bitcoin at block 961,632 and froze around block 961,633, quickly falling dozens of blocks behind the main chain.
2. The fork inherited full Bitcoin mining difficulty but had only about 2.5 percent miner signaling and lost almost all of its supporting hashpower within a day.
3. For ordinary BTC users, the main chain remains the economic reality; the fork mainly highlights governance limits and some technical replay risks rather than a change to Bitcoin itself.

Deep Dive

1. Fork Launch And Early Stall

BIP-110 entered its mandatory signaling window at block 961,632, creating a minority chain where nodes enforce the proposal and reject non-signaling blocks, while standard nodes accept both. Monitoring sites report the enforcing branch stalled at block 961,633 after producing only two blocks, as the main chain advanced more than 80 blocks ahead, widening the gap between them, according to Cointelegraph.

The two enforcing-chain blocks were mined by the Roughnecks group via Oceans DATUM protocol, after which no third block appeared for many hours, leaving the minority chain effectively frozen, as described by Crypto.news.

Bitcoins dominant chain continued producing blocks roughly every 10 minutes, with major pools extending it normally, while exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken reported standard operations, as noted by CryptoSlate.

2. Why Hashpower Abandoned BIP-110

BIP-110, a Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, aims to restrict non-financial data in transactions, targeting things like Ordinals-style inscriptions to reduce congestion and fees. Its activation rules require 55 percent of blocks in a difficulty period to signal support, but signaling peaked at only about 2.5 percent, with none of the first hundred-plus post-split blocks on the main chain signaling, per Crypto.news.

Roughnecks, responsible for the only two minority-chain blocks, publicly halted BIP-110 mining and urged others to stand down, while Oceans hashrate collapsed from around 36 EH/s to near 1 EH/s, a drop of over 95 percent, as reported by Bitcoin.com. With so little hashpower and the inherited difficulty near 127 trillion, the enforcing chain faced hours-long block times and no realistic path to the next difficulty adjustment.

Prominent voices such as Michael Saylor and Adam Back argued that BIP-110s approach threatens Bitcoins neutrality, predicting the fork would stall into irrelevance while Bitcoin continues normally, as covered by U.Today.

3. User Impact And What To Watch

For everyday BTC holders and most infrastructure, Bitcoins main chain remains the canonical network; the stalled BIP-110 branch has virtually no economic activity or exchange support so far. The proposals restrictive rules have not activated on the main chain, so transaction behavior today is unchanged, according to Bitcoin.com.

Technical risk exists around replay: pre-fork coins can be spent on both chains if the minority fork ever gains value, because BIP-110 does not include built-in replay protection, as noted by Crypto.news. Supporters have discussed a nuclear option of changing the forks proof-of-work algorithm to escape Bitcoins difficulty, but no switch has been executed yet, per Bitcoin.com.

Confidence: high, because multiple independent news outlets and monitoring tools report consistent block heights, signaling rates, and miner behavior.

Conclusion

BIP-110s enforcing branch shows how a Bitcoin fork without meaningful miner hashpower quickly stalls, even with some vocal node and developer support. The episode leaves the main BTC chain and its monetary role untouched, but underscores that durable changes to Bitcoin consensus require broad alignment between miners, nodes, and economic actors, not just a technically valid proposal.