Bitcoin’s most polarizing governance battle of 2026 is heading toward a quiet defeat. BIP-110, the proposal designed to restrict non-financial data on Bitcoin’s blockchain, has mustered roughly 0.31% of total hashrate support as of late June, with major mining pools conspicuously absent from the signaling effort.

The mandatory signaling phase is projected to begin around block height 961,632, somewhere between August 7 and August 15. The proposal needs 55% of miners to signal support for an early lock-in. It currently has 0.31%.

What BIP-110 actually tries to do

In technical terms, the proposal caps transaction output data at 34 bytes and restricts OP_RETURN usage to 83 bytes. It would make it significantly harder to embed images, tokens, and other non-monetary content directly on Bitcoin’s base layer.

The proposal was originally introduced as BIP-444 back in October 2025 before being formally reassigned. Its author, Dathon Ohm, designed it as a temporary measure, a one-year consensus soft fork that would essentially give Bitcoin a trial period of tighter restrictions on data usage.

Proponents argue that protocols like Ordinals and Runes have driven up transaction fees and placed unnecessary strain on node operators.

The numbers tell a bleak story

Node support for BIP-110 sat at 2-3% in early 2026. That translated to roughly 583 out of approximately 24,481 nodes in January, with much of that support attributed to Bitcoin Knots software rather than deliberate ideological alignment.

Miner support is even thinner. The 0.31% hashrate figure translates to about 5 EH/s out of a total network hashrate of approximately 940 EH/s.

The first block signaling support for BIP-110 was mined by Ocean pool back in March 2026. Since then, no major mining pool has followed suit. Ocean, run by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, has long been an outlier in the mining world, known for filtering certain transaction types that larger pools process without hesitation.

Why the big pools aren’t biting

Critics of the proposal have been vocal. Blockstream CEO Adam Back and well-known Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp have both raised concerns about the risks involved. Their objections center on several points: the potential for a chain split if enforcement is inconsistent, reputational damage to Bitcoin from a contentious fork attempt, and the fundamental enforcement problem that only nodes running the new rules would actually uphold the restrictions.

Even if BIP-110 somehow activated, its restrictions would only apply to nodes that chose to enforce them. Miners and nodes that didn’t upgrade would continue processing the transactions BIP-110 seeks to block.

What this means for investors

The near-certain failure of BIP-110 carries implications beyond the technical debate. For market participants, the immediate takeaway is that Ordinals, Runes, and similar protocols aren’t going anywhere. The economic incentives for miners to process these transactions remain intact, and the political will to restrict them doesn’t exist at the hashrate level where it matters.

Bitcoin’s upgrade mechanism requires overwhelming consensus. BIP-110’s failure to gain traction shows that even proposals with passionate grassroots support can stall completely if they don’t align with miner economics.