Foundry USA Polls Bitcoin Miners on Proposal to Curb Blockchain Data Bloat

Foundry USA, currently the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool by hashrate, has invited its participants to weigh in on Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110). The move signals a potential shift in how the industry’s major players view the controversial influx of non-financial data that has characterized the network over the past year.

BIP-110 seeks to implement stricter limits on the amount of data that can be stored within a single Bitcoin transaction. If adopted, the proposal would effectively reduce the footprint of “inscriptions”—digital artifacts and tokens that utilize the blockchain’s storage capacity for purposes other than simple value transfer. This technical adjustment aims to address what some developers describe as “spam” or “bloat” that threatens the long-term efficiency of the network.

The debate over blockchain storage intensified in early 2023 with the emergence of the Ordinals protocol. By leveraging the Witness section of a transaction—a space expanded during the 2017 SegWit and 2021 Taproot upgrades—users began embedding images, text, and even software directly into the ledger. While this created a new economy for Bitcoin-based NFTs and BRC-20 tokens, it also led to record-high transaction fees and increased the hardware requirements for running a full node.

Foundry USA’s decision to poll its customers reflects the complex nature of Bitcoin governance. As a mining pool, Foundry aggregates the computing power of thousands of individual miners to solve blocks. By asking for a signal, the pool is attempting to gauge whether the producers of the network’s security favor a “purist” approach to the protocol or prefer the high revenue generated by fees from data-heavy transactions.

Historically, Bitcoin upgrades have required broad consensus among developers, miners, and node operators to avoid chain splits. The 2017 Blocksize War serves as a primary precedent for these tensions, where the community split over how to scale the network for higher transaction throughput. BIP-110 represents a modern iteration of this conflict, pitting those who view Bitcoin strictly as a sovereign financial layer against those who see it as a permissionless data storage platform.

Critics of the proposal argue that any attempt to filter transaction types constitutes a form of censorship. They maintain that as long as a user pays the market rate for block space, the content of the transaction should be irrelevant to the network’s validators. Conversely, supporters of BIP-110 argue that excessive data storage threatens decentralization by making it too expensive for average users to maintain their own copies of the blockchain. Data from mempool.space shows that transaction fees have fluctuated wildly during peak inscription activity, occasionally pricing out standard financial transfers.

For miners, the economic incentives are split. While inscriptions have provided a significant revenue boost—particularly following the most recent halving event which reduced the block subsidy—the long-term health and decentralization of the network are vital for the value of the asset they mine. The results of the Foundry USA poll could provide the first clear indication of where the majority of the network’s physical infrastructure stands on the issue.