The minority chain created by Bitcoin's contested BIP-110 soft fork has fallen 18 blocks behind the main network, underscoring just how little mining power actually backs the proposal despite it entering its mandatory-signaling phase over the weekend. The split originated at block 961,632, where two rival pools produced competing versions of the same block: Antpool mined a standard, non-signaling block, while Roughnecks — the pool backing BIP-110 — mined a version-bit-4-signaling block compliant with the new rules, fracturing the chain in two.
The gap has only widened since. Roughnecks managed to extend its BIP-110 chain by a single additional block, reaching height 961,633, but the main Bitcoin chain has already pushed ahead to 961,651 — an 18-block lead that reflects the enormous hashrate mismatch between the two chains. Bitcoin's network difficulty currently sits at 127.48 trillion, a level calibrated for the full weight of the main chain's hashpower; the BIP-110 chain inherits that same difficulty target while commanding only a sliver of the network's miners, making each new block dramatically slower to produce.
Why BIP-110 struggled to gain support in the first place
BIP-110 is a temporary soft fork aimed at limiting large data pushes, witness data, and certain Taproot functions that let users embed arbitrary content — images, text, tokens — directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. In practice, that means Ordinals inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens would face the most direct disruption, since both protocols rely on the exact transaction structures the proposal restricts. Activation required miners to signal readiness by setting version bit 4, with early lock-in needing 55% support across a 2,016-block difficulty period. CoinDesk reported that signaling support never came close, sitting at just 2.53% — 51 of the preceding 2,016 blocks — when the mandatory-signaling phase began at block 961,632. That threshold is the same one covered here when the phase first kicked off.
Related: Bitcoin's BIP-110 Fork Stalls After Two Blocks as Chain Split Unfolds
A fork that enforces itself, not the network
Once mandatory signaling began, nodes actually running BIP-110 software started rejecting any block that didn't set the required version bit — but ordinary Bitcoin nodes kept accepting both signaling and non-signaling blocks without any special treatment. That asymmetry is exactly why the fork produced a minority chain rather than a network-wide rule change: only nodes and miners who opted into BIP-110 are enforcing it, while the vast majority of Bitcoin's hashpower simply continues mining the chain it always has.
What happens to a fork that can't keep pace
A minority chain running at a fraction of the main network's hashrate but the same difficulty level faces a structural problem: blocks arrive slowly, and the gap to the dominant chain tends to compound rather than close on its own, absent a difficulty readjustment or a surge in support from additional miners. With support still measured in single-digit percentages and the chain now 18 blocks adrift, BIP-110's mandatory-signaling attempt looks, for now, more like a demonstration of how little appetite exists for the change than a credible path to activation.
