Bitcoin developers push BIP-54 soft fork to fix four consensus rule vulnerabilities

November 5 — According to CryptoBriefing, Bitcoin's next major protocol upgrade may be a soft fork called BIP-54, the "Great Consensus Cleanup," aimed at fixing four vulnerabilities in the network's consensus rules that have existed since the protocol launched in 2009. The proposal targets time warp attacks, "poison" blocks that require long validation times, the 64-byte transaction vulnerability in the Merkle tree, and replay risks posed by duplicate coinbase transactions.

BIP-54 was first drafted by developer Matt Corallo in March 2019 and formally received a BIP number in April 2025. Test vectors were merged in late 2025, and testing began on the Bitcoin Inquisition Signet network in February 2026. MARA Pool and ViaBTC have already begun producing BIP-54-compatible coinbase transactions on mainnet. Corallo estimates the probability that BIP-54 becomes the next soft fork after Taproot at about 80%. Paul Sztorc of LayerTwo Labs criticized the proposal as merely "cleanup work" that adds no new features. The report notes that BIP-54 will not change Bitcoin's economic model, supply schedule, or token structure, but it can reduce the network's attack surface.