Bitcoin’s BIP-110 Soft Fork Gains 3% Validator Support

Proposal limits data volume to combat network spam.

As of January 25, 729 out of 24,482 (~3%) nodes in the Bitcoin blockchain signaled support for the soft fork under BIP-110. The initiative aims to combat spam.

Introduced in early December 2025, the proposal suggests a temporary consensus-level limit on the size of data transmitted in transactions. Led by the Bitcoin Knots team, the program is designed to last one year, with adjustments or changes based on community feedback.

Approval of the soft fork requires support from 55% of validators. So far, none of the 20 largest mining pools have shown interest.

According to BIP-110 authors, including Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, arbitrary data embedding places additional strain on node operators and diverts resources from the primary mission of the first cryptocurrency—improving the financial system.

The proposal includes the following key changes:

• The size of transaction output data is limited to 34 bytes, except for OP_RETURN (up to 83 bytes);
• “Inscriptions” (SegWit) are limited to 256 bytes;
• Only certain versions of SegWit (v0 and Taproot) are allowed;
• Temporary restriction of some elements of the Taproot soft fork.

“All known use cases [of Bitcoin] will remain fully operational and unaffected,” the authors assert.

Debate within the community over transaction size restrictions intensified last autumn when a controversial update to Bitcoin Core v30 was implemented. It increased the OP_RETURN limit from 80 to 100,000 bytes.

Critics argue that the increasing hardware demands due to spam undermine the protocol’s appeal as a decentralized monetary network. Bitcoin advocate and researcher Matthew Kratter stated:

“It’s like one of those parasitic plants, like ivy, that completely covers a tree, consuming it and destroying its internal structure. The ivy itself also dies. That’s what spam can do to Bitcoin.”

In October, Bitcoin developer known as dathonohm also introduced BIP-444, which proposes temporarily limiting the ability to add arbitrary data to the blockchain to reduce the risk of illegal content placement.