Bitcoin’s Next Soft Fork Has a Janitorial Plan, Not a Quantum Makeover 🧹

Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo estimates an 80% chance that the proposed Great Consensus Cleanup, known as BIP-54, will be Bitcoin’s next soft fork. The upgrade, first proposed in 2019, targets four vulnerabilities in Bitcoin’s consensus rules, including weaknesses in its difficulty adjustment mechanism and denial-of-service vectors among miners. No formal activation timeline has been established.

Corallo, a long-time Bitcoin developer and BIP-54 co-author, described the proposal as a practical cleanup exercise for developers who have not yet participated in a soft fork. “There’s a laundry list of things we know of that we really need to clean up,” he said during an appearance on MARA Foundation TV. “All of these issues are real concerns that could impact Bitcoin negatively, but they’re not like, ‘Oh, the sky is falling.’” He added that BIP-54 “fixes some stuff that everyone agrees are problems.”

Not everyone considers maintenance work an exciting upgrade. Paul Sztorc, co-founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs, wrote on X that BIP-54’s potential activation is “kind of depressing, since it is a janitorial maintenance fork that doesn't do anything.” At TABconf in Atlanta, Sztorc said Bitcoin’s “best and brightest” generally expect the Great Consensus Cleanup to be the next soft fork, with the earliest estimate in September 2027 and most expecting 2028 or later.

The proposal comes after the activation of Taproot in 2021 and years of friction over protocol changes, a process often framed as “ossification.” Broader proposals including OP_CAT (BIP-347) and OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (BIP-119) have struggled to reach ecosystem-wide consensus, while quantum resistance and other major issues continue to attract attention.

Corallo said BIP-54 could also serve as a deployment template for future soft forks, particularly after recent disputes over activation mechanisms. “In every recent soft fork, there’s also been a bunch of drama about activation mechanisms,” he said. “So hopefully we could do a soft fork to go through that drama, and then copy and paste and reuse it and head off some of that drama [for future soft forks].”