Foundry Asks Bitcoin Miners to Vote on BIP-110 Soft Fork
Foundry, the Bitcoin mining giant and subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG), the world’s largest mining pool by hashrate, has officially called on miners to vote on the BIP-110 soft fork. This proposal, which aims to restrict non-financial data in Bitcoin blocks, is deeply dividing the community and reigniting the debate over the network’s true purpose.
At the time of this announcement, Bitcoin was trading at $64,300.92 on Binance (5:05 PM UTC, July 18, 2026), in a stable market context marked by renewed attention on the protocol’s fundamentals.
What Is BIP-110?
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110) is a soft fork proposal that would modify block validation rules to significantly limit the volume of non-financial data that can be included in Bitcoin transactions. Concretely, BIP-110 introduces a new locking script structure that would make it more expensive—or even impossible—to inscribe arbitrary data on the chain. This includes NFTs via the Ordinals protocol, text inscriptions, and other forms of data not strictly related to value transfers.
This proposal is part of a long tradition of debates around scalability and the use of Bitcoin block space. Since the network’s creation in 2009, the question of what should or should not appear on the blockchain has been at the heart of community discussions.
Foundry’s Call to Miners
Foundry, which controls a significant share of the total Bitcoin network hashrate, has announced it will submit BIP-110 to a formal vote among miners connected to its pool. According to available information, mining operators affiliated with Foundry will be able to express their position via a signaling system in the blocks they produce. This voting process, lasting several weeks, will measure the level of support or opposition to the proposal within the mining ecosystem.
Foundry’s initiative is particularly significant given its weight on the network. As the largest Bitcoin mining pool, its position can considerably influence the adoption or rejection of protocol change proposals. However, the company has stated it is not seeking to impose a direction, but rather to facilitate a democratic decision-making process among miners.
The Debate: Financial Bitcoin vs. Versatile Bitcoin
BIP-110 crystallizes a fundamental opposition between two visions of Bitcoin. On one side, purists of “Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic payment system” believe the network must remain strictly dedicated to financial transactions. This vision, faithful to Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper, holds that inscribing non-financial data—such as images, text, or NFT metadata—diverts block space from its legitimate use and unnecessarily increases blockchain size.
On the other side, advocates of a more versatile Bitcoin argue that the Ordinals protocol has demonstrated unexpected and exciting innovation. Inscriptions, whether digital artwork or textual data, represent for them a creative use of block space that could attract new users and use cases to the network. Some even argue that these applications could strengthen network security by increasing transaction fees.
The Explosion of Ordinals and Inscriptions
Since the advent of the Ordinals protocol in 2023, millions of inscriptions have been recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain. This phenomenon has led to a significant increase in network congestion at certain times, as well as a rise in transaction fees during periods of high activity. While some see it as proof of the Bitcoin ecosystem’s vitality, others denounce a pollution of the chain and a distortion of the original project.
BIP-110 proposes to solve this problem at its root by modifying consensus rules so that non-financial data becomes structurally too expensive to inscribe. It is not an explicit ban—it would still be technically possible to inscribe data—but rather an economic deterrent mechanism that would make mass inscriptions unprofitable.
Technical Implications of the Soft Fork
As a soft fork, BIP-110 would be backward-compatible: blocks produced under the new rules would be accepted by nodes that have not updated their software, while updated nodes would reject blocks containing non-compliant data. This mechanism ensures a smooth transition, provided a sufficient majority of computing power adopts the update.
Technically, BIP-110 would modify the script verification function to impose stricter limits on the content of OP_RETURN opcodes and locking scripts. It would also introduce a new standard transaction type that makes it more difficult to encode arbitrary data in the form of Bitcoin addresses.
The developers behind the proposal estimate that these modifications are minimal from a code perspective but maximal in their impact. They emphasize...
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