TL;DR:Â
- The developer lifofifoX published a solution to fragment files into allowed sizes, with the backing of Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor.Â
- The BIP-110 technical proposal requires the backing of 1,109 flagged blocks out of a total of 2,016 within a two-week window to be activated through mining.Â
- Public monitoring recorded a flagging level below 1% at the close of June 30, 2026, maintaining the historically low trend seen since December 2025.
As expected, the heated dispute surrounding the BIP-110 upgrade proposal opened a deep debate about the fundamental purpose of the decentralized network. Ordinals developers claim their technology will survive this rule change, whose main objective is to prevent users from storing files directly on the blockchain.
The core of the conflict lies in whether the network should exclusively process monetary transactions or any type of information for which users are willing to pay network fees. Through inscriptions, images and text can be stored permanently. Dathon Ohm’s proposal seeks to reduce the allowed space for this data to 256 bytes per fragment.
Technical impact and network split risks
According to code specifications, this space limit would invalidate the storage method that Ordinals currently use. The restriction would have a fixed duration of one year from its implementation and would deactivate automatically, without affecting elements previously recorded in the transaction history.
To achieve regular activation, miners must include a specific flag in the blocks they process. However, data from the public monitor on June 30 indicated that miner support did not exceed 1% since voting opened in December 2025. The period of highest network adoption barely reached 0.79% in mid-June 2026.
Despite low miner flagging, the proposal’s design includes a forced activation phase for early August 2026. According to the parameters of the soft fork promoted by independent economic nodes (UASF), computers running the software compatible with the regulation will automatically reject any block that does not contain the required validation flag.
Given this scenario, Blockstream CEO Adam Back warned of a real risk of a chain split (fork), which could fragment the network into two incompatible versions. For his part, Michael Saylor, chairman of MicroStrategy, described the internal regulatory measure as an unnecessary risk to the global stability of the system.
Luke Dashjr, maintainer of the Bitcoin Knots software and contributor to the initial draft, argued last Thursday that if the proposal does not succeed, the system will lose the scarcity and spam resistance that differentiate it from central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
If BIP110 fails, Bitcoin fails with it.
I am not interested in any CBDC, much less an unregulated CBDC pretending to be decentralised.
There's already plenty of scamcoins filling that role anyway.
— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) July 3, 2026
The developers’ response and the economic factor
The creators of inscriptions developed alternative mechanisms to counteract space limitations. On July 2, programmer lifofifoX published an update that splits large files into multiple fragments of allowed size, thus bypassing the proposal’s restrictions. Casey Rodarmor, creator of Ordinals, validated the technical change on the GitHub platform.
The financial aspect also plays a central role in the community dispute. According to market data from October 2024, the introduction of the Runes protocol generated a 32% increase in transaction fees collected by miners. Those who oppose the restriction argue that this capital flow incentives network security, while proponents of the proposal point out that node operators are forced to store gigabytes of information unrelated to traditional payments without receiving economic compensation for it.
The critical mandatory voting period is set for the second week of August 2026, a date that will determine whether the ecosystem assimilates the rule or if the dissenting software gives rise to a minority alternative asset.
