Bitcoin Remains in Death Cross as BIP-110 Soft Fork Fails to Gain Network Traction

Beneath the chart, the more diagnostic story for protocol observers is the sudden failure of BIP-110: as KuCoin reports, the proposed soft fork's mandatory signaling window opened on August 7 and immediately fractured the network, with the mainnet outpacing the minority chain within hours.

Macro Tape and Consensus Anomaly

The 4-hour chart shows price holding above the EMA50 support at $64,156.1 and the EMA200 at $63,658.4, with the MACD golden cross at 260.05 keeping the short-term trend structurally bullish. RSI at 58.81 sits neutral within the Bollinger band, whose upper resistance lies at $65,075.45 — the level to watch for any sustained breakout before a deeper test of the 50-EMA. Layered on this is the more consequential technical argument: BIP-110's 55% signaling threshold, set deliberately below the conventional 95% to ease deployment, was never approached. Final-period participation measured only 51 signals out of 2,016 blocks, a 2.53% rate concentrated almost entirely in Ocean Pool.

The Fork That Resolved Itself

At block 961,632, AntPool mined the first non-signaling block, which mainstream nodes accepted and BIP-110-supporting nodes rejected outright. The main chain reached block 961,659 while the BIP-110 chain stalled at 961,633 — a 26-block gap that effectively reduces the proposal to a User-Activated Soft Fork the user base never showed up for. Node adoption of the BIP-110 software stack (predominantly Bitcoin Knots) is estimated between 2% and 8%, with both endpoints contested. The proposed restrictions, formally titled "Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork" and authored by the anonymous developer Dathon Ohm, would have activated at block 965,664 and self-lifted after 52,416 blocks, covering roughly one year of consensus-layer constraints on non-financial data storage.

What Security Reviewers Should Check

For practitioners, the operational checklist is narrow but specific: confirm which branch your node software is following, flag any wallet-side incompatibility with pre-signed transactions, and treat any UTXO behaving unexpectedly as a potential Taproot edge case rather than a bug. Jameson Lopp's published analysis flagged fragmentation risks, potential creation of unspendable UTXOs in Taproot edge cases, the inability to truly prevent data embedding long-term, and a compatibility burden on Miniscript tooling. Adam Back's summary on X was blunter: the proposal "breaks multiple mechanisms, lacks both technical consensus and ecosystem consensus." Beyond technical channels, the loudest commentary has migrated to creative media coverage of the cultural framing. The state-bloat conversation has not been resolved — it has merely been deferred, and the next attempt will face the same threshold problem unless the miner-signaling mechanism itself is redesigned.