Bitcoin’s long-running debate over “anti-spam” changes took another sharp turn this week as support for the BIP-110 soft fork proposal failed to clear the threshold needed to move forward. After a contentious process, the branch effectively stalled within hours—an outcome observers had largely expected given the economic realities of running parallel mining on a minority chain. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers again pushed the timing of the CLARITY Act vote, and the market digested fresh signals across regulation, custody security, and institutional demand. Separately, Ethereum researchers advanced a proposal to curb staking rewards as more ETH is locked, while critics warned it could undermine incentives for validators and the broader ecosystem. Key takeaways BIP-110’s anti-spam approach failed to attract enough miner signaling support and quickly stalled on a minority chain. U.S. Senate procedural steps for the CLARITY Act have been scheduled for September rather than being forced throu...
Bitcoin’s contentious BIP-110 upgrade track is showing tangible friction in the form of a widening chain split. According to the BIP-110 monitor, the enforcing (BIP-110 validating) branch has stalled at block 961,633 after producing only two blocks, while the non-enforcing branch has advanced to block 961,721—pushing the gap to 88 blocks. As the disagreement persists through the period where difficulty adjustments cannot yet fully catch up, the episode is again highlighting how “mandatory signaling” mechanics can turn a soft-proposal into an operational contest between node policies and mining output. Key takeaways The enforcing BIP-110 branch halted at block 961,633, while the non-enforcing chain reached 961,721, widening divergence to 88 blocks. BIP-110 nodes reject blocks that do not signal via version bit 4, while ordinary Bitcoin nodes accept both signaling and non-signaling blocks—enabling two simultaneous histories. Mandatory signaling began at block 961,632, following a s...