Bitcoin's BIP-110 Hits Mandatory Signaling With Almost No Miners on Board, and a Hardware-Wallet Hack Piles On

Block 961,632 was mined on 8 August 2026 at roughly 20:06 UTC, marking the moment a controversial proposal called BIP-110 entered mandatory signaling on the bitcoin network. Within twenty-four hours, miner support sat below 3%, and a separate software vulnerability had been used to drain funds from hardware wallets that holders had been told were among the safest places to keep their bitcoin. The two stories landed on the same news cycle and together exposed the gap between bitcoin's rhetoric of user sovereignty and the patchy infrastructure underneath it.

Read together, the events sharpen a question that has nagged the network since its earliest days: when the people who run the software and the people who buy the hardware both prove fallible, who is actually in charge of the coins? BIP-110 is a procedural fight over that question; the wallet hack is a reminder that the answer still depends on which code happens to be running, and on whose machine.

A soft fork with no miners

BIP-110 is a user-activated soft fork, a category of change that activates when enough full nodes adopt new rules regardless of what miners do. Mandatory signaling opened with block 961,632, according to a CoinDesk technical brief published the same day. The same report put miner support at under 3%, drawing on signal data published by bitcoin mining pools and analysed by the outlet's policy team. A Cointelegraph dispatch on 8 August at 21:17 UTC described the proposal as testing whether "enforcing nodes can sustain the change amid limited miner signaling," and flagged talk of a hard-fork fallback if the activation attempt fails.

A CoinDesk feature from 7 August at 11:45 UTC explained the persistence question more bluntly. "BIP-110 has attracted only a sliver of miner support," the outlet reported, "yet its user-activated design means the proposal continues toward its activation date and (most likely) beyond." In other words, the mechanism is designed to shrug off miner indifference, not to require it. That is the design point and the political flashpoint.

Monexus assessment: a near-zero signaling rate is not by itself a referendum on whether the change ships, because the activation path runs through node operators, not hashrate. It is, however, a referendum on legitimacy. If the fork activates anyway, the community will spend months negotiating which chain carries the bitcoin brand.

The replay risk sitting underneath the debate

The technical concern was spelled out the same week in a CoinDesk article timestamped 2 August at 02:30 UTC. A developer quoted in that piece warned that "if a minority chain appears this weekend, buyers could replay signed fork-coin sales on bitcoin itself, making doing nothing the safest move until the chains can be separated." The risk is replay: a transaction signed under one chain's rules can be re-broadcast against the other chain, draining real bitcoin from a holder who thought they were moving fork coins.

For ordinary holders, the operational implication is conservative. Do not move coins until the chain split is resolved, or until an exchange or wallet provider explicitly tells you which chain it will credit. Selling "fork coins" between fork and resolution is the dangerous move, because the same signature may unlock real BTC on the dominant chain.

The sources do not specify which exchanges have already issued chain-separation guidance to their users as of 9 August 2026.

A hardware-wallet flaw nobody wanted to test

Hours before block 961,632, a separate piece of bitcoin infrastructure failed in a more old-fashioned way: it got hacked. Moneyweb reported on 9 August at 02:00 UTC that "a software vulnerability allowed hackers to steal bitcoin from affected hardware wallets, reigniting debate over self-custody." The outlet framed the incident as an attack on the proposition that air-gapped devices are categorically safer than custodial accounts, and noted that the affected wallets had been marketed to retail users as a high-trust option.

This is the kind of story the self-custody community treats as a stress test rather than a refutation. Hardware wallets shift the trust boundary from a custodian's balance sheet to a chip manufacturer and a firmware maintainer. When the firmware fails, the shift collapses back into a custodial problem, with the user holding the loss. The hack is also the second piece of bad news for retail infrastructure in the same week. An Investing.com dispatch on 8 August at 08:51 UTC noted that bitcoin's price had ticked toward $65,000 "as fresh security risks hit infrastructure," tying the wallet story to the broader tape.

The macro tape the debate is sitting on

BIP-110 and the wallet hack are not happening in a vacuum. Two Investing.com pieces published on 8 August tracked bitcoin stuck in the low-$64,000s to mid-$65,000s range, with one piece at 07:02 UTC flagging an ADX reading "of bull trap." A separate CoinDesk live updates article on 7 August at 07:44 UTC held bitcoin flat at $64,300 ahead of the US jobs report, noting that "Brent climbed on stalled Hormuz talks, reviving the inflation worry that has capped bitcoin all summer." The following day's CoinDesk update, on 6 August at 07:26 UTC, framed the move toward $65,000 as a function of "Trump's comments on jobs, inflation and a possible Strait of Hormuz deal." A separate CoinDesk daybook piece on 7 August at 11:42 UTC made the more uncomfortable observation: "Bitcoin's volatility has nearly disappeared. The risk hasn't."

Monexus analysis: the price tape is acting like a compression coil. Realised volatility is sitting near multi-year lows while the protocol layer is hosting both a contested rule change and a custody-side security breach. When the tape eventually expands, the catalyst is more likely to come from a policy decision or an infrastructure failure than from a directional crypto-native headline.

What the next ten days actually contain

Three dates worth circling on the calendar, drawn only from the sources in front of us. First, the BIP-110 activation window itself, which the CoinDesk brief on 8 August at 20:06 UTC placed against block 961,632. Second, the US payrolls print flagged in the 7 August CoinDesk live update as "the next catalyst" for risk assets. Third, the chain-separation window, which the developer quoted in the 2 August CoinDesk piece put at "this weekend," a window that begins to close only once exchanges and wallet providers declare which chain they will credit.

The honest uncertainty here is real. The sources do not specify how many coins were lost in the wallet hack, whether any of the BIP-110-coverage exchanges have published chain-separation guidance, or whether the hard-fork fallback discussed in the 8 August Cointelegraph dispatch has any serious organisational backing. Those are the questions to watch between now and the next fork milestone, and they will tell readers whether the network's institutions can absorb a contested change without breaking the user experience underneath them.

Desk note: Monexus framed this as a structural story about who actually carries authority in a decentralised network, with the chain rule change and the wallet breach treated as twin pressure tests. The wire frame on the same day treated the two stories separately; we read them as one news cycle.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-bip-110-mandatory-signaling
• https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/08/07/frame-bitcoin-s-bip-110-enters-mandatory-signaling-with-less-than-3-miner-support
• https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/08/08/bitcoin-holders-risk-losing-real-btc-if-they-sell-coins-from-bip-110-fork-says-developer
• https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/08/06/why-bitcoin-s-bip-110-refuses-to-die-despite-near-zero-miner-support
• https://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-crypto/bitcoin/hack-of-supposedly-safe-bitcoin-tool-tries-faith-of-the-devoted/
• https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bitcoin-rises-toward-65000-as-fresh-security-risks-hit-infrastructure-4847628
• https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bitcoin-tests-62k-support-with-breakout-looming-live-levels-93CH-4829888
• https://www.coindesk.com/daybook-us/2026/08/07/bitcoin-s-volatility-has-nearly-disappeared-the-risk-hasn-t
• https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/08/07/live-updates-bitcoin-flat-at-usd64-300-before-us-jobs-report-with-oil-back-as-a-headwind
• https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/08/06/live-updates-bitcoin-nears-usd65-000-as-oil-inflation-hopes-keep-macro-bid-alive