The BIP-54 proposal, known as the Great Consensus Cleanup, aims to fix four longstanding vulnerabilities in Bitcoin’s consensus rules without adding new features. It addresses a time-warp exploit in the difficulty adjustment algorithm, slow-validating “poison” blocks that can overwhelm miners, weaknesses in the Merkle tree and risks involving duplicate coinbase transactions. First drafted by Matt Corallo in 2019 and later revived by Antoine Poinsot, it received its official proposal number in April 2025 before testing began on the Signet network in February 2026. MARA Pool and ViaBTC are already producing BIP-54-compatible coinbase transactions on the mainnet, although the change has not been activated. Corallo puts the probability that BIP-54 becomes Bitcoin’s next soft fork after Taproot at 80%, with no expected impact on Bitcoin’s price or economic model.
Source: Read the original article
