Tether, the issuer of the stablecoin, has revealed its plan to allocate its current and future Bitcoin hashrate to the OCEAN Bitcoin mining pool to enhance the decentralization of the network.
According to Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino in a statement made on April 15, “Allocating our hashrate to OCEAN aligns with our mining investments and supports our mission to bolster Bitcoin against centralizing influences.”
Even though Bitcoin’s hashrate is distributed across various miners, the process of building blocks is largely dominated by a few major players, including Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC.
The OCEAN protocol aims to decentralize this block-building process, allowing miners to utilize their open-source DATUM protocol to generate their own block templates, thereby minimizing reliance on centralized entities and increasing resistance to censorship, according to Tether.
Tether plans to employ OCEAN’s DATUM software throughout its global mining operations, including in remote areas of Africa.
“DATUM enables on-site generation of distinct block templates and aggregates thousands of mining rigs with low-latency performance, thus ensuring global competitiveness while fostering geographical and operational diversity,” Tether stated.
Currently, Tether utilizes Bitcoin hashrate at sites in Uruguay, Paraguay, and El Salvador, the latter being its headquarters.
This initiative coincided with Tether’s announcement of a $500 million investment in Bitcoin mining in late 2023.
OCEAN was established by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr in 2023 and has received backing from prominent figures such as Block CEO Jack Dorsey. In May 2024, OCEAN moved its headquarters to El Salvador.
In December 2023, Dashjr sparked debate after criticizing Bitcoin Ordinals users for burdening the network with “spam,” although he denied allegations that OCEAN was censoring these non-fungible token-like transactions.
OCEAN still has significant market share to capture
As per mempool.space data, the OCEAN protocol currently mines between 0.2% to 1% of Bitcoin blocks.
Over the past week, it has mined nine blocks, including two consecutive blocks (892342 and 892343) on April 14.
However, OCEAN’s output is just a fraction of that of Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC, which have mined 331, 199, and 161 Bitcoin blocks respectively in the same period, accounting for over 66% of all blocks.
The partnership with Tether is expected to provide a significant boost to OCEAN’s hashrate, which has reached 18.3 exahashes per second (EH/s) in the last 24 hours.
In comparison, Foundry USA’s hashrate during the same period has surpassed 298 EH/s, leveraging hashrate from major Bitcoin mining companies such as Hut 8, Bitdeer, and Bitfarms.
