BIP-110 signaling stalls under 1% of Bitcoin hashrate
Miner signaling for BIP-110 sits near 0.6% of blocks over 60 days, far short of the support that carried Segwit's activation.
Ocean Mining's VP of Development and Engineering Jason Hughes says BIP-110, a proposed Bitcoin protocol change, is failing to gather the miner support it needs before its activation window at block 961632. In a post republished by Bitcoin Magazine, Hughes lays out the signaling data and argues the proposal has no realistic path to majority backing.
The numbers behind the claim
Hughes cites two figures. Node signaling for BIP-110 runs between 7% and 15%, depending on which network crawler is used, a range he calls unreliable but still far from a majority either way. The harder number is hashrate: over the trailing 60 days, only about 0.6% of mined blocks have signaled support for BIP-110, and Hughes says the recent uptick reflects rented hashrate from the same small set of proponents rather than new miners joining in.
He contrasts this with Segwit's 2017 activation, which entered its user-activated soft fork (UASF) phase with roughly a third of network hashrate already signaling support before the final push tipped it into majority enforcement. BIP-110 is starting from under 1%, a gap of more than 30 percentage points from where Segwit stood at a comparable stage. Hughes, who says he holds no position for or against the proposal itself, frames this purely as a read of the data ahead of the block 961632 checkpoint. Read the original post at Bitcoin Magazine.
What weak signaling actually means
Soft fork activations run on hashrate, not sentiment. A proposal can have loud advocates online and near-zero backing from the pools that actually produce blocks, and that mismatch is exactly what Hughes documents. Segwit worked because miners, merchants and users all wanted it, and the UASF threat was credible because a third of hashrate was already there to be tipped over. BIP-110 has none of that economic weight behind it yet.
That matters because a soft fork attempted without majority hashrate support doesn't just stall quietly. Hughes is explicit that BIP-110 "can and will" cause a chain split if enforced by a minority of hashrate, since non-signaling miners keep producing blocks the old rules recognize as valid while the network fragments over which chain is heaviest. His advice to miners is blunt: signal only if you actually want the change, don't signal if you don't, and watch which chain retains the most cumulative work around the activation block rather than assume BIP-110's advocates have already won.
The underlying argument is that premature claims of consensus are more dangerous here than the proposal's opponents. If a change this consequential can't clear even Segwit's low starting bar of a third of hashrate, calling it inevitable is doing rhetorical work the data doesn't support. Miners making infrastructure decisions based on "BIP-110 is basically certain" are being sold a narrative, not a measurement.
What would change the picture
The number to watch is hashrate signaling in the days immediately around block 961632, not node counts, which are cheap to run and easy to spin up in bulk. If major pools that have stayed silent suddenly start signaling in that window, it would suggest real economic backing is materializing late, the way Segwit's did. If the 0.6% figure holds flat or only grows through the same small set of rented operators Hughes describes, that's the clearest sign the proposal fails to reach the threshold it needs and any chain split risk falls on whoever tries to enforce it anyway.