BIP-110 stalls, Bitcoin pivots on its 200-period moving average

At block 961,632, the enforcing nodes that had been running BIP-110 for days flicked on a new obligation: signal the change, or be excluded. The mandatory-signalling milestone went live on 8 August 2026 with the support of less than 3% of hashrate behind it. By 9 August the BIP-110 branch had produced just two blocks. By 10 August the price of bitcoin was trading in a $63,500–$65,500 squeeze, teetering on its 200-period moving average on the hourly chart.

The episode is the closest the network has come to a soft-fork schism in several years, and the cleanest test in a decade of what happens when a protocol change is enforced without a mining majority. Read together, the 10 August tape, the chain data, and the developer warnings describe a market in which the institutional plumbing worked exactly as designed: fork concerns were absorbed by ETF inflows, hashrate stayed with the status-quo chain, and holders were told to do nothing until the chains could be separated.

What BIP-110 actually does, and why the miners said no

BIP-110 is a soft fork, not a hard fork, which is the first thing that confused the headlines. It changes the rules the network enforces at the consensus layer but, in principle, does not require every node to upgrade in lockstep. The deployment milestone of 8 August was supposed to test whether enforcing nodes could sustain the change on the strength of their economic weight alone. The signal they required of miners is mandatory: keep producing blocks under the old rules and you are, in effect, building on a chain that the enforcing cohort considers invalid.

Miners voted with their hashrate, and the answer was no. Coindesk and Cointelegraph both reported, across the 8–9 August window, that support sat below 3% of hashrate at activation and widened as the activation block receded. By 9 August Cointelegraph's coverage described the enforcing fork as stuck at bitcoin's full mining difficulty with mandatory signalling proceeding with little hashrate support. Two blocks is the visible output. The discussion that has emerged since, including a hard-fork fallback, is the audible signal that the original soft-fork path is no longer the most likely resolution.

The argument inside the developer community is about governance as much as code. Proponents framed the change as a clean-up of long-standing policy cruft; opponents, including influential commentators Coindesk cited by name, argued that enforcing rules without a mining consensus is the kind of unilateralism the network was designed to resist. Both readings are defensible. The chain is running the test in public.

The price tape absorbed it, barely

If you only watched the order books on 9 and 10 August, you would not have known a governance fight was underway. Bitcoin slipped below $65,000 on 9 August, with Investing.com's reporting framing the move as one in which ETF inflows offset fork concerns. By 10 August the same outlet's live-levels feed had bitcoin trapped inside a $63,500–$65,500 squeeze, with the 200-period moving average on the hourly chart functioning as the line that bulls and bears were both watching. ADX readings earlier in the week had flashed a bull-trap warning at the $65,156 resistance level.

The reasonable interpretation: the market did not panic. Spot ETF flows were the marginal buyer, and the marginal buyer did not need to be convinced that BIP-110 would fail to step in. Monexus assessment: the absence of a price dislocation is not the same as the absence of risk. Two blocks on a minority chain is a state, not a resolution. The replay-risk warning a developer gave to Coindesk on 8 August, that buyers could replay signed fork-coin sales on bitcoin itself and that doing nothing was the safest move until the chains separated, is still in force.

What miners, holders and node operators should be doing

The practical guidance that survived the weekend's coverage was blunt. The developer quoted by Coindesk on 8 August was explicit: if a minority chain appears, the safest posture is to do nothing, because signed transactions on the fork can be replayed on the main chain. That instruction was aimed at retail and treasury holders, not at miners or node operators, but the principle applies across the stack.

For miners, the calculation is hash-economics plus signalling cost. BIP-110 enforces through hashrate, not through code review, and the enforcement window is the period during which a block produced under the old rules is rejected by the enforcing cohort. Below 3% hashrate, the cost of compliance is high and the benefit of compliance is theoretical. The structural read is that miners with low marginal energy costs can afford to wait, while miners operating at the margin cannot afford to validate a minority chain and watch their blocks orphan. The network has chosen the path of least resistance, which is the path of least change.

For node operators, the question is whether to run enforcing software at all. The hard-fork fallback now under discussion is the alternative that does not require the same hashrate threshold. It would split the chain cleanly, which is what a minority soft fork cannot reliably do.

Stakes: a fork resolved by doing nothing

The most natural reading of the 8–10 August data is that BIP-110 will not be the change that ships, and that the developers behind it will need to find another path. Coindesk's 10 August daybook framed the episode as free-market capitalism in purest form. That is the kind of line a developer writes when the code has done what the code was meant to do, and the result is that nothing happens. The fork was tried, the fork was rejected, and the holders who sat on their coins and waited for the chains to separate did not lose money.

What the episode leaves behind is not a wounded protocol. It is a precedent: a soft fork, deployed and enforced, can fail to activate against an unwilling mining majority, and the network will keep producing blocks on the original rules. That is the lesson the next governance fight will inherit. The next question is whether the hard-fork fallback gets the hashrate that the soft fork did not.

Monexus framed this against the Coindesk / Cointelegraph wire, which treated BIP-110's stall as a working feature rather than a failure. Where the developer commentary emphasised replay risk and the political economy of hashrate, the price-side reporting from Investing.com treated the fork as background noise absorbed by ETF flows. The desk holds both readings as load-bearing.

Wire provenance

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

• https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/08/07/frame-bitcoin-s-bip-110-enters-mandatory-signaling-with-less-than-3-miner-support
• https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-bip-110-mandatory-signaling
• https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-bip-110-branch-stalls-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.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bitcoin-slips-below-65000-as-etf-inflows-offset-fork-concerns-4847718
• https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bitcoin-trapped-in-635k655k-squeeze-hourly-levels-93CH-4847929
• https://www.coindesk.com/daybook-us/2026/08/10/bitcoin-s-bip-110-episode-is-free-market-capitalism-in-purest-form
• https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bitcoin-tests-62k-support-with-breakout-looming-live-levels-93CH-4829888