BIP-54 May Become the Next Bitcoin Soft Fork

Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo estimated the likelihood of BIP-54 becoming the next network soft fork at 80%. The initiative aims to address four long-standing issues with consensus rules. However, this is the developer's personal assessment: no decision on activation has been made.

What Problems BIP-54 Solves

The Consensus Cleanup project was prepared by Matt Corallo and Antoine Poinsot. Its goal is to strengthen existing Bitcoin rules without adding new user features.

The first amendment addresses the timewarp attack. Miners controlling a large portion of the hashrate could theoretically manipulate block timestamps and reduce mining difficulty. BIP-54 limits such manipulations at the boundaries of difficulty adjustment periods, maintaining a two-hour allowance.

The second change limits the number of signature verification operations to 2500 per transaction. According to the authors' calculations, this can reduce the maximum verification time of specially crafted blocks by about 40 times. This is not about speeding up the processing of all regular transactions.

The third rule prohibits transactions exactly 64 bytes in size, excluding witness data. This eliminates ambiguity that could confuse them with internal nodes of the Merkle tree when verifying proofs of transaction inclusion in a block.

The fourth amendment changes the requirements for service coinbase transactions through which miners receive rewards. New restrictions on nLockTime and nSequence fields are designed to prevent the repetition of transaction identifiers in the future.

Why Activation Is Not Yet Guaranteed

The BIP-54 specification received Complete status on May 22, 2026, but this status indicates the document's completion, not the network's acceptance of the rules. The proposal involves a soft fork: new requirements will tighten block verification and remain compatible with old nodes, although operators are advised to upgrade.

Corallo believes that a relatively limited set of fixes will help Bitcoin participants agree on the order of future updates. Since the activation of Taproot in November 2021, no new soft forks have been conducted on the main network. However, some developers would prefer changes that expand the protocol's capabilities.

There is no official schedule for BIP-54. Among developers surveyed at TABconf, timelines ranged from September 2027 to 2028 and beyond. These estimates are not a community decision. The update also does not address Bitcoin's quantum resistance issues.