Tether partners with OCEAN mining pool to decentralize Bitcoin block-building

Stablecoin issuer Tether has announced it intends to deploy its existing and future Bitcoin hashrate to OCEAN’s Bitcoin mining pool in an effort to strengthen the network’s decentralization.

“Deploying hashrate to OCEAN aligns with both our mining investments and our broader mission to fortify Bitcoin against centralizing forces,” Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino said in an April 15 statement.

While Bitcoin hashrate is decentralized, the block-building process conducted by mining pools is mostly centralized by a few dominant actors — most notably Foundry USA, AntPool and ViaBTC.

The OCEAN protocol attempts to decentralize this process by empowering miners to build their own block templates using their open-source DATUM protocol, reducing dependency on centralized intermediaries and enhancing censorship resistance, Tether said.

Tether’s deployment would leverage OCEAN’s DATUM software across all of its mining operations worldwide, including in rural areas in Africa. 

“By enabling on-site generation of unique block templates and aggregating thousands of rig connections with low-latency performance, DATUM ensures global competitiveness while promoting geographic and operational diversity,” Tether said.

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Tether currently deploys Bitcoin hashrate at sites in Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, where the $144 billion stablecoin issuer is also headquartered.

Those initiatives emerged around the time Tether announced it would invest $500 million into Bitcoin mining in late 2023.

OCEAN was created by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr in 2023 and has been backed by the likes of Block CEO Jack Dorsey. OCEAN also relocated its headquarters to El Salvador in May 2024.

Dashjr sparked controversy in December 2023 when he slammed Bitcoin Ordinals users for clogging the network with “spam.” However, he refuted claims that OCEAN censored the non-fungible token-like transactions.

OCEAN still has a lot of market share to capture

The OCEAN protocol currently mines between 0.2% to 1% of Bitcoin blocks, according to mempool.space data.

It has mined nine blocks over the last week, including two in a row at 892342 and 892343 on April 14.

However, OCEAN’s output remains a fraction of that seen by Foundry USA, AntPool and ViaBTC, which have mined 331, 199 and 161 Bitcoin blocks, respectively, over the same timeframe — accounting for over 66% of all blocks.

The Tether partnership would likely provide a much-needed boost to OCEAN’s hashrate, which has amounted to 18.3 exahashes per second (EH/s) over the last 24 hours.

By comparison, Foundry USA’s hashrate over the same timeframe has exceeded 298 EH/s, leveraging hashrate from the likes of Bitcoin mining firms Hut 8, Bitdeer and Bitfarms.

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