BIP-110 Flunks Its Own Test: Saylor & Co. Block Bitcoin's Spam-Diet Soft Fork 🪨

Bitcoin's proposed BIP-110 soft fork will not activate after failing to reach the 55% miner signalling threshold required for adoption, according to monitoring account Farside UK. The proposal, which sought to temporarily block non-payment data such as images and text from being inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain for one year, never accumulated sufficient hashpower support during its activation window. Farside UK announced the outcome on X, writing, "BIP-110 has now failed to reach a 55% threshold and can never reach such a threshold! BIP-110 failed and it will now spin off (Assuming no re-orgs)." Earlier in the week, the account had warned, "BIP-110 now needs over 73% miner signalling for the rest of this period, or else it will never reach the 55% threshold and will just spin off into a new coin."

Supporters of BIP-110 framed the measure as a way to mitigate blockchain spam and free up network resources for financial transactions on $BTC. The proposal, however, drew public opposition from several prominent Bitcoin advocates, including MicroStrategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, and JAN3 CEO Samson Mow, all of whom argued against altering the chain's data-carrier policies. The high-profile resistance, combined with insufficient miner signalling, ensured the soft fork could not meet its activation requirements within the designated period.

The failed activation means BIP-110 will spin off into a separate chain rather than altering Bitcoin's mainnet rules, assuming no blockchain reorganisation occurs. The episode marks the latest in a series of contentious governance debates within the $BTC community over how to address the rising volume of non-financial inscriptions and related network activity. As of the latest reporting, no reorg had been signalled, and the proposal stands as formally rejected on the path it was tracking.

The outcome leaves open the question of whether future proposals aimed at filtering non-payment data on Bitcoin will emerge, but for now the status quo on data inscription policy remains unchanged. The BIP-110 effort's collapse underscores how difficult coordinated soft-fork changes remain even when framed around widely shared concerns such as blockchain spam and block-space allocation.