Today in Crypto: BIP-110 Pushes Bitcoin Toward August Fork Deadline With Only 5 EH/s Signaling

Latest reporting indicates that a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP-110) pushing to ban Ordinals-style data inscriptions at the consensus level is barreling toward an activation window in early August, with less than 1% of mining hashrate behind it, raising legitimate concerns about a persistent chain split.

BIP-110, authored by Dathon Ohm and formally titled the Reduced Data Temporary Soft fork, proposes a one-year consensus-level restriction on arbitrary data embedding in bitcoin transactions.

The rules would target the most common methods used for Ordinals inscriptions, large OP_RETURN payloads, BRC-20 tokens, and certain Taproot constructions repurposed for data storage.

The proposal is written as a fork, albeit a soft fork, meaning its new rules are stricter than existing ones, but backward compatible.

Standard monetary transactions using P2PKH, P2WPKH, or Taproot key-path spends would remain fully valid.

After 52,416 blocks (roughly one year), the rules expire automatically with no lingering enforcement.

Supporters say it addresses a real problem: data storage competing with payments raises fees, increases node operating costs, and bends Bitcoin’s incentive structure away from its monetary purpose.

BIP-110 uses a modified BIP9 deployment requiring only 55% miner signaling (1,109 of 2,016 blocks per retarget period) rather than the traditional 95% threshold.