Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream and one of the few individuals cited in Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper, issued a stark public warning on May 29, 2026: a controversial proposal to ban large data payloads from Bitcoin transactions is heading toward its mandatory enforcement deadline with almost no miner support, and only two outcomes are possible — a chain split around August 7, or quiet failure to activate.
What BIP-110 does
BIP-110, formally titled "Reduced Data Temporary Softfork" and assigned to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository on December 3, 2025, would impose consensus-level restrictions on non-monetary data in Bitcoin transactions. Specifically, it would cap OP_RETURN outputs at 83 bytes and restrict OP_PUSHDATA payloads and witness stack items to 256 bytes. It would also invalidate large Taproot control blocks, Tapscripts using OP_SUCCESS opcodes, and spending undefined witness versions.
The target is explicit. The proposal's motivation section states that "the inscription hack first exploited in 2022" created "significant unnecessary burdens on node operators" and diverted development incentives away from Bitcoin as money. Ordinals and Runes — protocols that use Bitcoin's block space to embed images, token data, and other arbitrary content — depend on the mechanisms BIP-110 would block. Under the proposal, those protocols would be effectively frozen out of new transaction creation for the duration of its one-year term.
The proposal is not permanent. BIP-110 is structured as a temporary soft fork: if activated, its restrictions would expire after one year, at which point all UTXOs would again be unrestricted. It was previously filed as BIP-444 before being renumbered.
The UASF mechanism and why it's different from 2017
BIP-110 deploys via a User Activated Soft Fork — a mechanism that lets node operators enforce new consensus rules without requiring miners to signal readiness. Unlike BIP9, which triggers activation only after a supermajority of mining hash rate signals support over a defined window, a UASF takes effect at a pre-set block height regardless of what miners do.
The precedent for UASFs is the 2017 SegWit activation battle, where the threat of a UASF from node operators and users pushed miners to activate SegWit after months of stalemate. That campaign succeeded in part because it had broad, organized community backing — developer support, exchange support, and a vocal user base willing to run non-standard software.
BIP-110's situation is materially different. According to Back's warning on May 29, miner support for the proposal is currently near zero. Without miners, a UASF doesn't persuade — it splits. When the mandatory enforcement block height arrives, nodes running BIP-110 software will begin rejecting blocks that violate its data rules. If miners — who produce those blocks — are not compliant, the chain diverges: BIP-110 nodes build on one fork, the rest of the network builds on another.
August 7 and what happens next
BIP-110's mandatory enforcement block height falls on approximately August 7, 2026. Back laid out the situation plainly: if sufficient miners have not updated their software to comply with BIP-110's rules before that block height is reached, the network will fork. Nodes running BIP-110 will accept one chain; the mining majority will continue building a separate chain that permits the data payloads BIP-110 bans.
The alternative is that the proposal simply fails to gather enough node adoption to matter. With no credible economic or hash-rate backing, a UASF chain split can collapse almost immediately — the forked chain would have minority hash rate, minority exchange support, and near-zero liquidity. Back's framing of "failure to activate" as the second possible outcome acknowledges this: BIP-110 may produce a technically valid but economically non-viable fork that is abandoned quickly, or the proposal's enforcement may simply never reach a threshold that puts it in play.
Neither outcome is good for proponents of the proposal. A failed chain split would set back any future attempt to use UASF mechanisms against Ordinals and Runes. Quiet failure would leave the protocols intact and the data problem — from the anti-Ordinals camp's view — unaddressed.
What it means for Ordinals and Runes
The Ordinals protocol, which launched in 2023, allows users to inscribe arbitrary data onto individual satoshis using Bitcoin's witness space. Runes, introduced in 2024, extends similar logic to fungible token issuance. Both rely on the data capacity that BIP-110 would restrict. A successful BIP-110 activation would not destroy existing inscriptions — inputs spending UTXOs created before the activation height are explicitly exempt under the proposal's text — but it would prevent new inscriptions and Runes mints from being created using the restricted methods, for the duration of the one-year soft fork.
For a community that has generated billions of dollars in transaction fees and secondary market activity, the stakes are material. The Ordinals and Runes ecosystem has been one of the primary drivers of Bitcoin block space demand since 2023, and any credible threat to that ecosystem's continued operation generates significant response.
Bitcoin governance context
BIP-110 was authored by Dathon Ohm and is listed as a Draft in the Bitcoin BIPs repository. It has not passed through Bitcoin Core's review process, and there is no indication that Bitcoin Core, the dominant full-node implementation, has incorporated or endorsed the proposal. The proposal's activation mechanism is designed to work without that endorsement — that is the nature of a UASF — but it means BIP-110 would require users and node operators to run non-standard or patched software.
Bitcoin governance disputes of this kind historically resolve in one of three ways: the minority fork collapses and the proposal dies, the proposal is withdrawn before enforcement, or the split persists long enough to create genuine market confusion. The 2017 SegWit fight and the 2018 Bitcoin Cash/Bitcoin SV split are the two clearest precedents. BIP-110's situation more closely resembles the latter, where a minority acted on conviction without majority backing.
Between now and August 7, the key question is whether miner signaling changes materially. If hash rate support for BIP-110 remains near zero through July, the chain split scenario becomes less dangerous — the forked chain would be too weak to sustain itself — but Back's warning stands as a marker that the proposal is live, its clock is running, and anyone running Bitcoin infrastructure needs to be aware of what happens when that block height arrives.