A breakaway Bitcoin chain built around BIP-110—a proposal to ban non-financial data from transactions for one year—produced two blocks Saturday before mining activity stopped entirely. Eight hours after the fork activated, the minority chain sat at block 961,633 while Bitcoin's main chain had already reached block 961,681, a gap of 48 blocks representing roughly eight hours of normal production on one side and almost nothing on the other.
The split triggered at block 961,632, the point at which nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that did not carry a signal supporting the proposal. Ocean pool mined both blocks on the BIP-110 chain. AntPool mined the first non-signaling block, which the main network accepted and BIP-110 nodes rejected, setting the two chains on separate paths within minutes of the fork.
BIP-110 is a direct response to the growth of Ordinals inscriptions and similar protocols that embed images, text and other non-payment data inside Bitcoin transactions. Supporters argue this traffic clogs block space and raises fees for users sending ordinary payments. Opponents counter that any user paying a valid transaction fee has the right to use block space as they see fit, and that miners and node operators have no standing to filter transactions by content.
The lack of miner interest was visible well before Saturday. Over the two weeks leading up to the fork, just 2.53 percent of blocks signaled for BIP-110. Activation without a chain split required 55 percent signaling. That gap was never close, and the fork proceeded as a minority action rather than a network upgrade.
The chain's near-immediate stall has a structural cause built into Bitcoin's design. Bitcoin recalculates mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks, targeting a 10-minute average between blocks. The BIP-110 chain inherited the main chain's current difficulty setting but controls only a small fraction of the network's total computing power. With so little hash rate, blocks arrive at long, irregular intervals instead of every 10 minutes. The difficulty cannot drop until the chain completes a full 2,016-block adjustment window—a process the BIP-110 situation monitor calculates will take approximately 350 days at the current pace, against 14 days on the main chain.
That 350-day adjustment window is also a hard ceiling on the fork's stated purpose. BIP-110 nodes require every block to signal support only through block 963,647. At the rate the minority chain is producing blocks, it will not come within range of that threshold before the enforcement window expires, making the proposal moot on its own terms.
Anyone holding coins on the BIP-110 chain faces a specific technical risk. Because both chains currently accept identical transaction formats, a signed transaction spending BIP-110 fork coins is also valid on the main Bitcoin chain. A buyer of fork coins can take that signed transaction, rebroadcast it on the main chain and collect real BTC from the same seller without authorization. This replay-attack exposure, combined with confirmation times stretching to hours, makes the fork coin difficult to sell safely.
The BIP-110 monitor also flagged a separate concern: a sudden wave of BIP-110 signaling nodes in the days before the fork may have overstated visible support for the proposal. Jameson Lopp said publicly that the signaling node count did not reflect genuine miner commitment. Signaling nodes count as data points in social arguments but carry no weight in Bitcoin's actual consensus rules, which measure hash rate, not node tallies.
AntPool and Ocean are both mining pools that aggregate computing resources from many individual operators and distribute rewards proportionally. AntPool is one of the largest pools by hash rate. Ocean positions itself as a more transparent alternative that pays miners directly from block rewards. Ocean produced both BIP-110 blocks and AntPool immediately mined the block that broke from the proposal—but Ocean's participation alone was not enough to keep the chain alive without broader support.
The fork coin has no exchange listing, no confirmed hash rate commitment beyond the two blocks already mined and no path to reducing difficulty for nearly a year. The two-block chain is not technically dead—any miner can extend it—but no miner has done so in hours, and the economics give little reason to start. Block rewards on a chain no exchange will list and no wallet will support do not pay for the electricity required to mine them.
The BIP-110 episode is the latest in a series of Bitcoin governance disputes that have exposed the gap between signaling activity and actual miner behavior. The 2017 SegWit2x hard fork collapsed for similar reasons when miners who had signed the New York Agreement quietly declined to follow through. BIP-110's enforcement window runs to block 963,647. At the main chain's pace, that block arrives in roughly 14 days. The minority chain will not get close.
