Bitcoin's BIP-110 Fork Is Dead on Arrival: Minority Chain Freezes After Two Blocks. What the Failed Split Means

Bitcoin briefly split into two chains on Saturday, August 8, 2026 at block 961,632, when nodes enforcing the BIP-110 soft fork rejected an AntPool block that did not carry the required signal and began following a competing version of the chain.

The minority chain mined just two blocks in roughly eight hours, both produced by a miner using OCEAN's DATUM system, and then froze. By Sunday it sat 111 blocks behind the main chain, with no new block in 17 hours.

Support was never close: only 51 of 2,016 blocks, about 2.53%, signaled for BIP-110 in the previous difficulty period, and zero of the first 113 main chain blocks signaled after the mandatory window opened. Michael Saylor estimates 99.85% of hashpower rejected the fork.

Because the breakaway chain inherited Bitcoin's full 127.48 trillion difficulty with a sliver of hashpower, monitors project its next difficulty adjustment is roughly 350 days away, against 14 days on the main chain.

Both chains still accept identical transactions, creating a replay trap: a signed transaction selling fork coins can be rebroadcast on the main network. The Bitcoin price was unaffected, holding near $65,000 through the weekend.

 

 

The months long fight over BIP-110 finally produced a real chain split over the weekend, and it lasted about as long as its critics predicted. The proposal, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, sought to restrict Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens and other non financial data on Bitcoin for one year. It never came close to its 55% voluntary signaling threshold, but its design included a backstop: a mandatory signaling window starting at block 961,632, during which nodes running BIP-110 software reject any block that fails to signal support.

That window opened on Saturday. The first test came immediately, when mining pool AntPool produced a block without the signal. The main network accepted it; BIP-110 nodes rejected it. Minutes later, a miner known as Roughnecks, using OCEAN's DATUM mining system, produced an alternative signaling block, and Bitcoin was formally running as two parallel chains.

The divergence did not stay competitive for long. In its first eight hours, the BIP-110 chain produced exactly two blocks while the main chain produced 48, keeping its normal ten minute rhythm. By early Sunday the minority chain was stuck at block 961,633 while the dominant chain passed 961,681, and by later in the day the gap had widened to 111 blocks, with the fork showing no new block for 17 hours. OCEAN reported about 257 petahashes per second pointed at its BIP-110 endpoint, a rounding error against a network measured in hundreds of exahashes.

The signaling data explains the stall. Just 51 of the 2,016 blocks in the previous difficulty period carried the BIP-110 signal, about 2.53%, and once the mandatory window began, signaling in the new period dropped to zero. Saylor, one of the proposal's most vocal opponents, estimated that around 99.85% of hashpower rejected the fork, and separately calculated that with roughly 0.15% of Bitcoin's hashpower, the minority chain would need on the order of 25 years to reach its first difficulty adjustment. Both figures are his own estimates, but the monitor data points the same direction.

The killer detail is difficulty. The breakaway chain inherited Bitcoin's full difficulty setting of 127.48 trillion, calibrated for the entire global mining fleet, while attracting almost none of that fleet. Bitcoin only recalibrates difficulty every 2,016 blocks, so a chain producing a block every several hours faces a wait that monitors project at roughly 350 days before mining gets any easier, versus the main chain's usual 14 day cycle. Without a sudden influx of miners willing to burn electricity on near worthless blocks, the chain simply cannot function as a payments network. As one analysis put it, a rule without miners remains mostly an intention.

There is one practical danger worth understanding even for holders who ignored the whole saga. Because the split was a soft fork dispute rather than a designed hard fork, the two chains share transaction formats and history, and neither implemented replay protection. Anyone who tries to sell coins on the BIP-110 chain signs a transaction that is equally valid on the main network, meaning a counterparty could rebroadcast it and collect real BTC from the seller. Combined with a chain that confirms transactions hours apart, attempting to trade fork coins is a trap with essentially no upside. The safe move, as with the fork itself, is to do nothing.

As a governance experiment, the weekend delivered an unusually clean verdict: the user activated soft fork playbook that worked for SegWit in 2017 fails without an economic majority behind it. Exchanges, wallets, miners and users all continued following the main chain without interruption, and no major platform listed or supported the fork coin. The result vindicates the warnings from Saylor, Adam Back and others that the mandatory window would create a split with no constituency, while also demonstrating how little damage such a split can do when support is this thin.

What it does not settle is the underlying argument. The questions BIP-110 raised, about non financial data on Bitcoin, node costs and who decides the network's rules, remain live, and the debate has already shifted to new proposals and forum threads. The difference is that the next attempt will carry the memory of a fork that died two blocks in.

For holders, nothing changed: funds are unaffected, the main chain never missed a beat, and deposits and withdrawals across the industry continued normally. The market treated the split as a non event, with Bitcoin holding near $65,000 through the weekend, supported by the macro. Traders can follow the live BTC/USDT price on MEXC, and anyone approached with offers to buy or sell BIP-110 fork coins should treat them with extreme caution given the replay 

 

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