Bitcoin Crossroads: Mining Behemoth Foundry Pushes Critical BIP-110 Soft Fork Vote

Foundry Digital, recognized as the foremost Bitcoin mining pool operator globally, has announced a new policy allowing its mining clients to decide how the pool will signal on the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110). The Rochester, New York-based firm communicated this decision to its miners via email, stating that participants would be able to cast their votes using their hashrate, which represents their computing power, either in favor of or against the proposed change.

BIP-110, also known as the “reduced data temporary soft fork,” is a significant proposal designed to implement a temporary restriction on spam within the Bitcoin blockchain. If this proposal is successfully adopted, it would lead to a soft fork, a backward-compatible rule change that would limit the amount of non-monetary data permitted on the network. Foundry emphasized the importance of miner participation in network governance, stating, “As miners, it’s important for you to have a voice and participate in the governance of the network.” They also highlighted that BIP-110 is one of the most actively debated proposals in the Bitcoin community, and miners' direct involvement is crucial for its potential activation.

The core mechanism of BIP-110 involves capping the amount of arbitrary, non-monetary data that can be carried by transactions. Specifically, its rules would restrict most new outputs to 34 bytes, reinstate an 83-byte limit on OP_RETURN outputs, and reject data pushes exceeding 256 bytes. Proponents of the proposal argue that this soft fork would help Bitcoin function more purely as a peer-to-peer monetary system. Conversely, opponents, including prominent figures like MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor and Blockstream co-founder Adam Back, contend that the proposal converts a policy dispute into a consensus change, potentially invalidating fee-paying transactions.

Foundry’s voting process is structured such that each vote’s weight is determined by an account’s average 10-day hashrate on the pool, calculated between July 6 and July 15. The company intends to signal its position based on the majority of hashrate-weighted votes accumulated throughout the signaling period, which is anticipated to conclude in early August around block 961,632. Foundry's default position is initially