On Saturday, nodes enforcing the BIP-110 rules diverged from Bitcoin’s primary blockchain at height 961,632. Those nodes began treating any block that failed to include the required version-bit signaling as invalid. When a non-signaling block was produced and accepted by the rest of the network, the enforcing nodes followed an alternative path instead, creating a separate minority chain supported by only a small fraction of total mining power.
BIP-110, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, sought to impose temporary limits—lasting roughly one year—on the inclusion of non-financial data such as images, text, and similar content inside Bitcoin transactions.
Advocates argued this would ease congestion and lower costs for ordinary payments.
Critics countered that fee-paying users should retain freedom to use block space as they choose and that the change risked fragmenting the network.
The proposal relied on a 55 percent miner-signaling threshold within a difficulty period for early lock-in.
That level was never approached; recent signaling hovered near 2.53 percent.
Once the mandatory signaling window opened, enforcing nodes (primarily those running Bitcoin Knots) rejected non-compliant blocks and isolated themselves.
AntPool produced the first non-signaling block accepted by the main network, while a miner associated with Ocean generated the competing block that the BIP-110 branch followed.
In the hours after the split the minority chain generated only two blocks and stalled near height 961,633, while the main chain advanced dozens of blocks further.
Because the breakaway chain inherited the prevailing high difficulty yet commands negligible hashrate, new blocks arrive only at long intervals.
A difficulty adjustment that would ease mining cannot occur until the chain completes another full 2,016-block period—an interval projected to take many months under current conditions.
Both chains continue to accept the same set of transactions for now, which creates potential replay-style risks for anyone attempting to move coins on the minority branch.
The two-week mandatory-signaling window runs only to block 963,647; at the observed pace the BIP-110 chain has no realistic prospect of reaching it.
Economic infrastructure—exchanges, wallets, and custodians—has shown no indication of recognizing the side chain as a distinct asset.
The episode demonstrates that a user-activated soft-fork attempt lacking meaningful mining and economic support results in a slow, isolated ledger rather than a network-wide rule change. Bitcoin’s main chain, backed by the overwhelming majority of hashrate, has continued operating without interruption.