New DOG Mode Bitcoin client bypasses stalled BIP 110 to free $25m
A prominent Ordinals advocate has proposed a new Bitcoin client that bypasses a stalled consensus vote to relax data limits, a move that could unlock $25 million in trapped capital for token protocols.
Leonidas, co-founder of the Runestone project, announced an open-source Bitcoin client called DOG Mode on Friday. The software aims to bypass the stalled BIP 110 proposal, which seeks to restrict non-financial data on the network but has failed to gain miner backing. DOG Mode instead targets Bitcoin Core’s relay policies, which govern what individual nodes forward to peers.
The client would raise the maximum standard transaction size from 400,000 weight units to 3,900,000, allowing transactions to fill nearly an entire 4 million weight unit block. It would also cut the dust limit from a range of 294 to 546 satoshis down to a single satoshi. Lowering this floor could free an estimated $25 million in bitcoin currently used as padding by Ordinals and Runes protocols to clear transaction minimums.
BIP 110 attempts to cap arbitrary data by rewriting the network's consensus rules, requiring a user-activated soft fork and a 55% miner supermajority. The proposal has drawn zero support in the current signaling period and has never cleared roughly 1% in any period, according to monitoring data. DOG Mode requires no network-wide vote because it only alters relay rules, leaving the underlying consensus rules intact.
Under current Bitcoin Core defaults, users wanting to send large or low-value transactions must bypass the relay network by submitting them directly to miners through broker services like MARA's Slipstream. DOG Mode would eliminate this friction. The client needs only one miner to process the transactions for them to confirm, meaning there is no threshold, no signaling window, and no deadline.
The development highlights a growing fragmentation in how factions are fighting over Bitcoin’s data limits. The restrict-data camp carries its node support almost entirely through Bitcoin Knots, a long-running alternative to Core. DOG Mode would serve as the mirror image, a Core fork for the pro-token side that Leonidas claims would deviate far less from Core than Knots does.
Despite the market implications, the initiative remains entirely theoretical. There is currently no repository, no version, and no benchmark. Leonidas is acting as a community leader soliciting developers to build the client and miners to adopt it. The dust limit change he is requesting would release capital directly back into the markets where his own DOG token trades. The token's price was down 1.2% in the 24 hours following the announcement.
