Longtime Bitcoin developer and BIP-54 co-author Matt Corallo said he believes there is an 80% chance that the "Great Consensus Cleanup" will become Bitcoin’s next soft fork—a practical fix for issues that everyone agrees are problematic.
This upgrade, first proposed in 2019 under the name Great Consensus Cleanup (BIP-54), aimed to address various longstanding issues in Bitcoin's consensus design, including vulnerabilities ranging from the network difficulty adjustment mechanism to denial-of-service attack vectors among miners.
Corallo recently said on MARA Foundation TV: “We know there’s a long list of issues that really need to be addressed. These issues are real and could negatively impact Bitcoin, but they’re not ‘the sky is falling’ level problems.”
Although the official timeline for advancing the BIP has not been determined, Corallo believes there is an 80% chance the Great Consensus Cleanup will be adopted by the network. In a conversation with Isabel Foxen Duke of the MARA Foundation, he described it as a practical exercise for Bitcoin developers who have not yet experienced a soft fork.
Corallo said the core of BIP-54 is "fixing something everyone agrees is problematic," addressing four specific vulnerabilities:
- Poison blocks: If miners seek a short-term competitive advantage, they can mine a specially crafted block that exploits performance bottlenecks to deliberately slow down the verification speed of other nodes.
- Time warp bug: There is a vulnerability in Bitcoin’s biweekly difficulty adjustment window that allows miners controlling a majority of the hash rate to manipulate block timestamps and artificially accelerate the production of new blocks.
- Merkle malleability: Since a 64-byte transaction exactly matches the data size of an internal node in the Merkle tree, an attacker could theoretically forge proofs to deceive lightweight clients into accepting fraudulent transactions.
- Duplicate coinbase transactions: A historical design quirk once allowed duplicate transaction IDs, and this issue will reappear at future block heights, creating a vulnerability that could overwrite existing coins or disrupt ledger accounting.
However, not everyone views this maintenance-oriented soft fork as a major positive. Paul Sztorc, co-founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs, said on X that activating BIP-54 is “a bit frustrating because it’s just a clean-up maintenance fork that does nothing.”
At TABconf in Atlanta, Storc noted that among Bitcoin's "best and brightest," there is widespread agreement that the Great Consensus Cleanup is likely to become Bitcoin's next soft fork, with the earliest estimates pointing to September 2027 and most expecting it to occur in 2028 or later.
Since the activation of Taproot in 2021, the Bitcoin community has been stuck in a years-long deadlock over protocol changes. This friction is often summarized as “ossification,” and broader protocol upgrades such as OP_CAT (BIP-347) and OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (BIP-119) have continued to struggle to gain consensus across the entire ecosystem.
Corallo stated that soft forks have historically required overcoming technical obstacles, but recently he has observed that political and social friction has become equally important.
The Bitcoin community spent months debating how Taproot should be activated, with key points of contention including the miner signaling threshold and mandatory user "flag day" proposals. Corallo believes that BIP-54 could establish a deployment paradigm for future soft forks.
He said, "Each recent soft fork has been accompanied by significant controversy over the activation mechanism. So hopefully, by going through all of this once more with a single soft fork, we can replicate and reuse this process to preemptively resolve some disputes for future soft forks."
In this sense, BIP-54 demonstrates not only that Bitcoin can achieve technical consensus on upgrades, but also that it can reach social consensus.