With 2.53 per cent of hashpower signalling support, the breakaway chain inherited Bitcoin's full mining difficulty and is now projected to wait 350 days before its next adjustment.
The Bitcoin network split on Saturday when nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that failed to signal support for the proposal. Roughly eight hours later, the enforcing branch had produced two blocks. The main chain had advanced by 48.
The mandatory signalling window opened at block 961,632. AntPool mined the first non-signalling block, which the rest of the network accepted and BIP-110 nodes rejected. A miner working through Ocean, the only pool that had switched its miners to signal for BIP-110 by default, produced the alternative that the breakaway chain now follows. Neither side has changed the transactions it will accept, so anything valid on one chain is valid on the other.
Support was never really there. Only 2.53 per cent of blocks in the preceding 2,016-block period signalled for BIP-110, against the 55 per cent threshold required for activation without a split. F2Pool refused outright. AntPool, with roughly a fifth of network hashrate, stayed silent. Foundry USA, which controls close to a quarter of hashrate, opened a hashrate-weighted miner vote in which non-responses counted as No, and would only flip its own signalling to Yes if supporters cleared 51 per cent of participating hashrate. They did not.
The mechanical problem for the enforcing chain is difficulty. Bitcoin recalculates mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks to keep block times near ten minutes. The BIP-110 branch inherited Bitcoin's current setting but has under 3 per cent of the machines, so its blocks arrive hours apart. It cannot ease that difficulty until it completes another 2,016 blocks at that pace. The BIP-110 situation monitor puts the next adjustment 350 days away on the minority chain, against 14 days on Bitcoin.
BIP-110 itself is a one-year moratorium on non-financial data inside Bitcoin transactions. Its seven consensus rules cap output sizes and data fields, and are aimed squarely at Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, Runes and oversized OP_RETURN payloads that have periodically driven fees higher and bloated node storage. Backers frame it as returning block space to payments. Opponents, including Michael Saylor of Strategy, argue that anyone paying the fee has bought the right to use the space as they wish, and that miners and node operators should not be adjudicating which transactions count as legitimate. On this evidence, opponents have won the argument through the only mechanism that matters on Bitcoin: hashpower.
The split also creates a novel problem for anyone hoping to sell fork coins. Because both chains still accept identical transactions, a signed transaction spending fork coins works equally well on Bitcoin. A buyer who receives coins on the minority chain can rebroadcast the same transaction to the main network and take real BTC from the seller, a variant of a replay attack that developers flagged over the weekend. The obvious countermeasure of waiting for deep confirmations before releasing anything is undermined by the chain producing a block every few hours rather than every ten minutes. There is no functional market for the fork coin, and the mechanics of the chain guarantee there will not be one soon.
The two-week window in which BIP-110 nodes demand every block signal support runs to block 963,647. At the current pace the minority chain will not come close, which locks in another failed state and leaves the software rejecting the entire Bitcoin main chain from that point forward. Users running BIP-110 nodes will therefore be running a network with effectively no economic activity on it, unless miners defect en masse. Defecting would mean walking away from the difficulty on the main chain, where every miner is already being paid, which is why nobody has.
There is a bit of theatre in what backers do next. Some are already talking about resetting the minority chain's proof-of-work parameters so it can produce blocks at a normal pace with its 3 per cent hashrate. That is a hard fork by any working definition, and it would sever the two-way transaction compatibility that gives the fork coin any value in the first place. It also concedes the point: a chain that cannot survive on Bitcoin's difficulty is not a chain that competes with Bitcoin.
The Ordinals debate is not over. It will resurface at the next proposal, and the arguments about block space, fees and what Bitcoin is for will play out again. The specific attempt to settle that debate through a soft fork has now been priced by miners. It cost the enforcing chain two blocks in eight hours to find out.
