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Leonidas launches Bitcoin $DOG Mode to lift transaction limit to 3.9 million weight units

Leonidas launches Bitcoin $DOG Mode to lift transaction limit to 3.9 million weight units

The open-source Bitcoin client would relax default relay rules for Ordinals- and Runes-style data transactions, reviving debate over censorship, fee-market design and who sets Bitcoin’s practical operating limits.

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Fact Check
Leonidas's own X post (@LeonidasNFT) directly confirms every element of the claim: the launch of an open-source Bitcoin client named $DOG Mode, raising the maximum standard transaction size to 3,900,000 weight units (from 400,000 WU), lowering the dust limit to 1 sat, relaxing relay rules for Ordinals and Runes, and doing so without changing consensus rules. CryptoBriefing independently corroborates these same facts on the same date. The primary and secondary sources are fully consistent.
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Summary

Leonidas, co-founder of the Runestone project and a prominent figure in Bitcoin’s Ordinals and Runes ecosystem, said he is launching an open-source Bitcoin client called $DOG Mode that would loosen relay restrictions for large data-heavy transactions without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules. The client would raise the maximum standard transaction size relayed by nodes from 400,000 weight units to 3,900,000 and cut the dust limit from 294-546 satoshis to 1 satoshi, which Leonidas said could release about $25 million in padding tied up in Ordinals and Runes outputs. The move comes as BIP 110, a user-activated soft fork intended to cap arbitrary data on Bitcoin, has attracted effectively no miner support, and it has revived debate over whether widely used relay defaults amount to de facto gatekeeping over transaction propagation, fee discovery and Bitcoin’s practical governance.

Terms & Concepts
  • relay policy: Node-level rules that determine which transactions are forwarded across the network, separate from the consensus rules that decide block validity.
  • dust limit: The minimum output size a node will usually relay, below which a bitcoin amount is considered too small to be worth processing.
  • fee-market: Competition among users to pay for transaction inclusion, influencing which transactions miners prioritize.