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Matt Corallo says 80% chance Great Consensus Cleanup is Bitcoin's next soft fork
The BIP-54 upgrade, proposed in 2019, would fix four long-standing consensus flaws. Developer Matt Corallo puts its chances of going next at 80%, though critics call it janitorial work.
Key points
- Matt Corallo, a BIP-54 co-author, told MARA Foundation TV there is an 80% chance the Great Consensus Cleanup is Bitcoin's next soft fork.
- LayerTwo Labs' Paul Sztorc called it a "janitorial maintenance fork", with developers at TABconf estimating activation in September 2027 at the earliest.
Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo says the Great Consensus Cleanup, known as BIP-54, has an 80% chance of being the network's next soft fork. Speaking on MARA Foundation TV, the BIP-54 co-author described a list of known flaws that need tidying up, adding that they are real concerns without being an immediate crisis.
The proposal, first put forward in 2019, addresses four vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's consensus rules. Poison blocks could let a miner slow node validation to gain a temporary edge over rivals, while time warp bugs let a majority of hashrate manipulate block timestamps to speed up issuance. Merkle malleability could let an attacker forge proofs to fool light clients, and duplicate coinbase transactions could resurface at future block heights.
Practice for developers
No formal timeline has been set. Corallo framed the work as practice for developers who have not yet been through a soft fork, and said a successful deployment could give future upgrades a template for avoiding arguments over activation. Bitcoin has seen years of gridlock since Taproot activated in 2021, with proposals such as OP_CAT and OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY struggling to win broad agreement.
Not everyone is enthusiastic. Paul Sztorc, co-founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs, called the prospect "kind of depressing" on X, describing BIP-54 as janitorial maintenance that does nothing. He said developers surveyed at TABconf in Atlanta mostly expect it to be next anyway, with the earliest estimate September 2027 and most pointing to 2028 or later.
What to watch: No formal timeline for BIP-54 has been set; developers surveyed at TABconf put activation in September 2027 at the earliest, with most expecting 2028 or later.
Live updates on NewsFeeds:BitcoinDesk editor: Keshav Aggarwal (accountable for this page; this summary was not edited by hand)
How this was produced: an AI model wrote this summary of Decrypt’s report, which we credit and link above. Read our Editorial and AI policy. Spotted a mistake? See Corrections.
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