Tether, Joins Ocean Mining Pool...Bitcoin Mining Decentralization Officially Supported

Ocean collaborating with Tether (Source: @ocean_mining, X)

Tether, which issues the dollar-based stablecoin USDT, is participating in the Ocean (OCEAN) mining pool as part of its Bitcoin mining business expansion. Ocean is a mining protocol created by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr, which has been noted as an alternative to mitigate the centralization of the Bitcoin network recently.

Tether has announced plans to link its global mining resources to the Ocean pool. In addition, it predicted a total investment of $500 million in mining infrastructure by 2025 and plans to simultaneously acquire shares of existing mining companies. This announcement is an extension of Tether's large-scale mining investment plan announced at the end of last year, and mining facilities operating in Uruguay, Paraguay, and El Salvador are expected to play a key role.

Tether stated that this collaboration is “a solution to the centralization issue of Bitcoin and a strategic decision to strengthen decentralized mining structures.” Particularly, Ocean's main technology, the DATUM protocol, allows miners to directly create block templates, which is significant in that it can distribute the block generation initiative held by existing large mining pools. This system does not rely on central servers and can connect thousands of mining devices with low latency, contributing to enhancing geographic distribution and operational diversity.

Luke Dashjr has often been in the center of controversy due to his strict interpretation and beliefs on the Bitcoin protocol. In particular, he criticized Ordinals users in 2023, saying it “pollutes the network with spam,” which drew backlash from the community. However, he drew the line on claims that the Ocean mining pool censors certain transactions by stating “It is not true.”

Since its launch in 2023, Ocean has gradually expanded its market share, but its proportion in the market is still limited. Over the past week, Ocean mined a total of 9 blocks, accounting for only 1% of the total. Compared to Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC, which each mined more than 300 blocks and accounted for over 66% of the total during the same period, there is a significant difference. If Tether begins supplying hash rate to Ocean in earnest, it could greatly impact this change in market share.

Currently, Ocean’s average 24-hour hash rate is at the level of 18.3 EH/s, which falls far short of Foundry USA’s record of 298 EH/s. However, if the collaboration with Tether becomes full-fledged, there are expectations that it could be an important turning point in terms of enhancing small mining pools’ competitiveness and network decentralization.

Ocean moved its headquarters to El Salvador in 2024, and Tether also has its headquarters in this country, increasing the likelihood that collaboration between the two will become more intimate in the future. This movement is being interpreted as the signaling of a new hash rate distribution strategy amid growing caution against centralized structures in the Bitcoin mining ecosystem.