OCEAN.

OCEAN launched in November 2023 as the successor to Eligius, the pool that Luke Dashjr, a long-time Bitcoin Core developer, opened in 2011 and that also paid its miners straight from its blocks. In a message on OCEAN’s website, Dashjr wrote that “11 entities” decided what went into almost every block, so Bitcoin “just happens to be a network that is not currently being censored”. OCEAN is run by Mummolin, a Wyoming company, which raised $6.2 million in a seed round led by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter and of the payments company Block. Its chief technology officer is Jason Hughes, who ran Eligius from 2012 under the name wizkid057.

Most pools collect each block’s reward themselves and pay their miners later. That lets a pool “withhold payment from individual miners, whether by their own choice or by legal requirement”, Mark Artymko, OCEAN’s president, said at the launch. OCEAN pays them in the block’s first transaction wherever it can, splitting both the new bitcoin and the fees by each miner’s share of the recent work, a method it calls TIDES. So the first transaction of an OCEAN block often pays dozens of addresses: block 964,810, in August 2026, paid 57. These are the miners’ shares of the reward, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. Miners need no account, only a Bitcoin address; one whose share is still below the minimum waits for a later block or, since 2024, can be paid over the Lightning NetworkLightning NetworkA network built on Bitcoin for payments through channels, without recording every payment as its own blockchain transaction..

OCEAN also wants miners, not pools, to choose what goes into blocks. Since September 2024 its miners have been able to build their own blocks with DATUM, software written by Hughes, while still sharing in the pool’s rewards; in April 2025 the stablecoinStablecoinA token designed to keep a steady value, usually one US dollar, which its issuer promises to buy back. It isn’t bitcoin, and it depends on that issuer. company Tether said it would mine through OCEAN this way. Such blocks usually carry a second name after OCEAN’s, that of the miner who built them. Blocks that OCEAN builds itself use Bitcoin Knots, a version of Bitcoin’s node software that Dashjr maintains, set to include “only transactions and reasonably small data”, in OCEAN’s words. They leave out inscriptionsInscription (ordinals)Data, such as an image, written into a Taproot payment's witness and tied to one satoshi, so it lives on the blockchain., files such as pictures written into transactions, which Dashjr calls spam; Jameson Lopp, then chief technology officer of the custody company Casa, called that label “subjective”.

BIP-110 went further than a filter. The proposal, first drafted by Dashjr, was a soft forkSoft forkA change that tightens Bitcoin's rules, so nodes that haven't upgraded still accept the new blocks., a tightening of Bitcoin’s rules: for a year, blocks carrying large pieces of data would have been invalid. In July 2026 OCEAN’s default connection began signalling support for it, and by CoinDesk’s account OCEAN made up nearly all of that support, about 2.6% of mining power against the 55% the proposal needed. On 8 August, at block 961,632, nodes enforcing BIP-110 split from the rest of the network, and OCEAN’s miners ended up on both sides: one of them found the BIP-110 chain’s first block, while Simple Mining, building its own blocks with DATUM, left out the signal and mined block 961,634 on the main chain. OCEAN moved its default connection back to the main chain the next day.

On 29 August 2026 OCEAN ended its support for the BIP-110 chain and said that Dashjr had left the company, which bought back his shares; both sides cited “different visions for the future of Bitcoin mining”. Dashjr went on to start CONVOY, a new mining venture which, OCEAN said, planned to carry on mining the BIP-110 chain. The blocks below are on Bitcoin’s main chain.