On June 25, 2026, Bitcoin's BIP 110 proposal reached "Complete" status, setting a countdown for a one-year softfork that would reimpose strict caps on how much arbitrary data miners can embed in transactions. Weekend signaling data tells a bleak story for its supporters: just 0.86% of miners have backed it so far, against a 55% threshold required for early lock-in.
The catch is that BIP 110 doesn't actually need miner consent to activate. Mandatory signaling kicks in automatically at block 961,632, expected around August 7. Full enforcement follows on September 1 no matter how many mining pools have opted in by then. Signaling itself works like a running tally, with miners marking each produced block to indicate support or opposition, but here the final vote is essentially bypassed by design.
What BIP 110 Would Actually Change
The proposal is a direct reversal of a call Bitcoin Core made in late 2025, when developers removed the historical 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN, a small text field that lets users attach non-payment data to a transaction, things like short notes, image references, or token records. The idea was to push data-heavy users toward prunable storage and away from methods that permanently bloat the UTXO set, the ledger of unspent coins every full node must keep. BIP 110 reverses that decision and goes further, introducing seven distinct consensus restrictions:
- OP_RETURN outputs capped at 83 bytes
- General data pushes capped at 256 bytes
- Five additional consensus-level restrictions applying to how data is embedded across transaction fields
Node-level support sits between 7% and 15%, almost entirely driven by users running Bitcoin Knots rather than Core. Knots has long been the client of choice for operators who want tighter filtering on which transactions their node accepts and relays. Developers like Luke Dashjr and communities such as Bitcoin University have made it the technical home base for those who view inscriptions, Ordinals, and Runes as spam that drives up storage costs for anyone running a full node.
Foundry's Internal Vote Could Shift the Math
Foundry controls somewhere between 25% and 30% of global hash rate. Over the weekend, the pool opened an internal vote letting individual rig owners direct their share of Foundry's power toward signaling BIP 110. A meaningful swing from that base alone could push overall signaling well past the 55% mark before the August 7 deadline. Whether enough miners vote yes inside Foundry to move the needle is still an open question, and the answer will likely define how contested September 1 actually becomes.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or an investment recommendation.
