BIP-110 was marked closed as its Bitcoin branch stalled

The BIP-110 specification was marked “Closed” on August 9, 2026 after the proposal’s enforcing branch split from Bitcoin’s main chain and then stopped advancing after two blocks. The exact event-day record was stark: contemporaneous monitoring placed the BIP-110 branch at height 961,633 while the ordinary Bitcoin chain had reached 961,721 as of 10:19 UTC, an 88-block gap.

That outcome mattered less as a market event than as a live test of Bitcoin governance. BIP-110’s supporters tried to make a temporary consensus rule enforce limits on arbitrary data stored in transactions. The branch’s near-immediate stall showed that node software can reject blocks by rule, but a viable chain still needs miners willing to extend it and economic actors willing to recognize it.

What split at block 961,632

BIP-110 specified mandatory signaling from block 961,632 through block 963,647. Nodes enforcing the proposal would reject any block in that window unless its version field signaled bit 4. Ordinary Bitcoin nodes did not impose that requirement.

At height 961,632, the network therefore produced incompatible candidates. The chain followed by most miners accepted a non-signaling block. The enforcing nodes followed an alternative signaling block produced through OCEAN’s DATUM system by a miner identified as Roughnecks. OCEAN’s block record verifies the alternative block’s height, hash, 4,046 transactions and inherited difficulty of 127.48 trillion.

Only 51 of the preceding 2,016 blocks had signaled for BIP-110, according to contemporaneous monitors. That is 2.53% when rounded to two decimal places, far short of the proposal’s specified threshold of 1,109 of 2,016 blocks, or 55%.

By August 9 the enforcing branch had produced only heights 961,632 and 961,633. The larger network continued normally. Calling the episode a split is technically accurate, but it should not be confused with evidence that Bitcoin’s dominant ledger stopped, that exchanges recognized a second asset, or that BIP-110 acquired majority economic support.

Why the branch stalled

The cause was mechanical. The minority branch inherited the same proof-of-work difficulty as the main chain but attracted only a small fraction of its mining power. Bitcoin adjusts difficulty after 2,016-block periods; without much more hashpower, the branch could not reach its next adjustment on anything close to the main network’s cadence.

The BIP’s own August 9 changelog then marked version 1.0.1 “Closed” following the chain split and stalled mining. That status change is the clearest primary record tying the development to August 9 rather than merely to the initial divergence on August 8.

The proposal itself would have imposed a one-year set of restrictions. Among them, new output scripts would generally have been capped at 34 bytes, OP_RETURN outputs at 83 bytes, and certain pushed-data or witness items at 256 bytes. Supporters framed those limits as protection for Bitcoin’s monetary function and node operators. Critics argued that valid fee-paying transactions should remain neutral as to purpose and warned that a low-threshold activation attempt could fracture consensus.

What the event established

The verified result on August 9 was narrower than either side’s broad claims. BIP-110 did not secure the mining support required by its own threshold, and the branch enforcing mandatory signaling fell far behind after two blocks. The main Bitcoin chain continued adding blocks.

The episode did not resolve the underlying dispute over inscriptions, data storage, relay policy or who should define acceptable use of block space. It did demonstrate the difference between writing consensus rules, running enforcing nodes and coordinating enough hashpower and economic adoption to make those rules authoritative. No token-price conclusion follows from that governance result, and this reconstruction makes no market-performance claim.