After BIP-110 Flops, Bitcoin's Next Soft Fork Faces a Showdown

Key Takeaways

• BIP-54 would close four Bitcoin consensus edge cases without adding new features.
• F2pool’s founder opposed BIP-54 on Aug. 10, complicating high-threshold miner activation.
• Bitcoin’s next test is a BIP-9 vote after BIP-110 stalled near block 961,635.

BIP-54, formally known as “Consensus Cleanup,” would make four narrow changes to Bitcoin’s core rules. The proposal is designed to close old weaknesses and unusual edge cases, not add new ways to use Bitcoin. Its supporters say that distinction matters: This is preventive maintenance for a network now worth far more than it was when many of its rules were written.

The proposal’s authors are Antoine Poinsot, a Bitcoin Core contributor associated with Chaincode Labs, and Matt Corallo, a longtime Bitcoin developer. Corallo first raised the broader idea in 2019. Poinsot revived and expanded the work in late 2023 and early 2024, and the proposal received its formal BIP-54 designation in April 2025. The specification was marked complete in May 2026 after testing and implementation work.

The Proposal Aims to Close Four Old Gaps

The first fix is intended to address a potential “timewarp” attack on Bitcoin’s mining difficulty. Bitcoin recalculates the difficulty of mining every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, to keep block production near one block every ten minutes. A majority of the network’s mining power could exploit how Bitcoin measures time across those periods, using manipulated timestamps to make blocks appear slower to produce than they really were.