Bitcoin Ordinals advocate Leonidas has proposed a new open-source Bitcoin client that would raise transaction size limits and reduce the dust threshold, seeking to remove policy restrictions affecting Ordinals and Runes transactions.
Summary
- Leonidas has proposed a new Bitcoin client that raises transaction size limits and lowers the dust threshold for Ordinals and Runes.
- Bitcoin $DOG Mode is intended to remove policy restrictions enforced by Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots rather than Bitcoin consensus rules.
- The proposal comes months after Ord.io shut down, as Leonidas continues to push for wider support for Bitcoin native digital assets.
In a Friday post on X, Bitcoin Ordinals advocate Leonidas introduced a proposal for an alternative Bitcoin client called Bitcoin $DOG Mode, describing it as software designed to remove limits enforced by existing Bitcoin clients rather than by the Bitcoin protocol itself.
The proposed client would increase the maximum individual transaction size to 3.9 million weight units (WU) from the 400,000 WU allowed under Bitcoin Core’s default policy. It would also reduce the dust limit to 1 satoshi, compared with the current 294 to 546 satoshis required by Bitcoin Core for standard transactions.
According to Leonidas, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots have enforced transaction policies for years that are not part of Bitcoin’s consensus rules. He said the new client is intended to remove what he described as unnecessary restrictions, adding that the long-term goal is to attract enough users for Bitcoin Core to eventually reconsider those policies.
Larger transactions and smaller outputs
If adopted, the higher transaction limit would allow Ordinals users to include much larger inscriptions or entire collections within a single Bitcoin transaction, including transactions that occupy most of a block.
The lower dust limit would also make it easier to create very small transaction outputs. Under the current default rules used by Bitcoin Core nodes, users often have to increase output values above the minimum threshold before their transactions are relayed across the network. Bitcoin $DOG Mode would instead allow outputs as small as 1 satoshi.
Bitcoin $DOG Mode is being positioned as an alternative to Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, the two most widely used Bitcoin clients.
Ordinals and Runes have remained divisive since their launch. Supporters view them as Bitcoin-native versions of non-fungible and fungible tokens, while critics have argued they consume valuable block space and amount to network spam.
Proposal follows Ord.io shutdown
The proposal comes just months after Leonidas announced the closure of Ord.io, one of the earliest Ordinals explorers. In May, he said the project would shut down after the team ran out of funding and no longer saw a sustainable path forward.
Ord.io, launched in 2023, had served more than 1 million users before announcing plans to go offline. The associated consumer app Zap also ceased operations after failing to reach sufficient user growth, while the team said it would preserve public Ord.io data on GitHub and remained open to another group taking over the project.
Activity around Bitcoin inscriptions has cooled since the strong demand seen during 2023 and early 2024. Runes generated $135 million in fees during the first week after Bitcoin’s 2024 halving, although transaction activity later declined.
