A Bitcoin fork that mined just two blocks before stalling is now the center of a price controversy, after a token from the failed chain appeared on an unverified exchange trading as high as $176.
The BIP-110 fork split away from Bitcoin on August 8 when developer Dathon Ohm’s software began rejecting blocks that did not signal support for the upgrade. Only 2.53% of miners had backed the proposal, far short of the 55% activation threshold. The breakaway chain inherited Bitcoin’s full mining difficulty with a tiny share of hash power, leaving blocks hours apart. By the next day, the chain was 18 blocks behind mainnet and effectively dead.
Over the weekend, a small group of supporters revived the stalled minority fork and switched its proof-of-work algorithm to Blake2b compatibility. The chain was relabeled with a reduced block size of 300 kilobytes. On September 2, the token started trading on Neoxa Exchange under the ticker BTCB2.
Price swings on thin books
BTCB2 opened near $80 per coin against USDC on Neoxa and quickly spiked. Within hours, the ask price climbed past $130, then hit $176 at one point. But the order books told a different story. Bids and asks sat frozen for extended periods, and total 24-hour volume reached roughly $94,100 on the USDC pair. A secondary BTC pair logged just $19,300.
One observer on X called the $80 price tag misleading. “A bid on a 130% spread, on a beta exchange, for a minority BLAKE2b fork listed as BTCB2. A single book nobody uses for BTC is not a valuation,” they wrote.
The thinly traded nature of the token means that even small buy or sell orders can swing the price dramatically, making the displayed figures unreliable as any measure of real market demand. Without deep liquidity, the price reflects the ambitions of a few buyers rather than any broad market consensus about what the fork is actually worth.
Warnings pile up against Neoxa Exchange
Complaints followed the listing almost immediately. A Reddit user in r/cryptocurrency flagged Neoxa as a scam after reporting issues with a deposit. “Wanted to warn everyone before anyone else loses money here,” the post read. Other subreddit users were less sympathetic, pointing out the risks of buying a token from an obscure platform.
The pro-BIP-110 website bitcoinbip110.org then published a public service announcement cautioning against Neoxa. The site described the platform as a “high-risk, unverified custodial exchange” and urged influencers to stop spreading unverified prices. The PSA specifically asked people to stop amplifying BTCB2 quotes that originate from Neoxa’s order book.
A Grok analysis also flagged Neoxa with a “high-risk designation,” though the exact criteria behind that label were not detailed. The designation appears to relate to the exchange’s lack of regulatory registration and thin operational track record.
“Influencers: Please Stop Amplifying the Unverified Exchanges and Unverified Prices Related To Bitcoin BIP110”
A Neoxa associate named Andy, responding on the Bitcoin Knots Discord server, said the exchange was not aware of the Reddit complaint. Andy also indicated the exchange was considering delisting BTCB2 entirely. “Hey guys, after all the hate we got from you guys, I will rather delist the coin. There be lots of time to withdraw your coins,” the message read.
The situation creates an awkward dynamic for BIP-110 supporters. The only exchange listing their token is one they themselves have publicly warned users not to trust. Any price discovery happening on Neoxa is, by their own admission, unreliable at best.
A fork with no base
The original BIP-110 proposal sought a temporary one-year soft fork to restrict non-monetary data in Bitcoin transactions, specifically targeting Ordinals-style inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens that had congested the network. The idea drew support from the Bitcoin Knots community, which has long pushed back against data-heavy transactions clogging block space.
Michael Saylor, the Strategy CEO and one of Bitcoin’s most prominent institutional holders, called the proposal the most dangerous internal threat Bitcoin faces. He warned in a series of posts that its restrictions could harm every holder by setting a precedent for political interference in the protocol.
When the fork activated at block 961,632 on August 8, only a handful of miners were signaling support. The chain mined two blocks before falling irretrievably behind mainnet. The Ocean mining pool, which had produced the first BIP-110 signaling block back in March, did not sustain the effort. It was revived on August 31 by supporters who reduced the block size and switched mining algorithms to Blake2b to attract a different set of miners.
At current BTC prices near $77,500, a fully valued BIP-110 token would theoretically be worth far more than the prices seen on Neoxa. But the market is too thin, too unverified, and too concentrated to support any such claim. Bitcoin Cash, the largest Bitcoin fork by market cap, trades at a tiny fraction of Bitcoin’s price despite having years of infrastructure and real liquidity behind it. Even Bitcoin SV, despite its own dedicated community, barely registers on most exchanges.
For anyone holding main-chain BTC, the practical risk from BIP-110 is replay attacks. If holders sell fork coins while spending their original Bitcoin on mainnet, the transactions could be replayed on both chains. The BIP-110 fork’s chain restarted under different rules than Bitcoin mainnet, which reduces but does not eliminate that danger. Users who received an equal amount of BTCB2 for every BTC they held at the fork height face the same dilemma that Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV holders navigated years ago.
The episode underscores how quickly speculative tokens can appear from essentially dead chains, and how difficult it is for ordinary users to separate real value from noise in illiquid markets. It also illustrates a pattern familiar from prior Bitcoin forks: supporters generate hype, exchanges rush to list for trading fees, and users lose money on platforms that do not meet basic standards of trustworthiness.
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