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About OCEAN
OCEAN is a decentralized Bitcoin mining pool. Unlike traditional pools, it operates in a non-custodial manner—miners receive rewards directly through Bitcoin's coinbase transactions, and the pool never holds their funds. Its DATUM system allows miners to construct their own block templates and decide which transactions to include, enhancing censorship resistance. The TIDES payment system provides transparent reward distribution that miners can verify.
Key problems with traditional pools include: excessive centralization of decision-making power, custodial risks, and opaque reward distribution. OCEAN addresses these through its non-custodial design, miner-built blocks, and verifiable payments.
The past six months have been turbulent for OCEAN. In August 2026, BIP-110—a fork it was the only pool to support, aiming to limit non-monetary data in Bitcoin transactions—failed. Due to technical incompatibility, OCEAN's Lightning payments were suspended for about a month, and post-fork mining rewards were permanently frozen for failing to reach confirmation thresholds. On September 4, 2026, Lightning payments resumed, and the on-chain payout threshold was lowered from ~1 million to 500,000 sats in response to affected small miners. During this period, OCEAN's hashrate accounted for roughly 2.5%–3.6% of the network.
OCEAN, launched in November 2023, is a non-custodial Bitcoin mining pool co-founded by Luke Dashjr with $6.2M seed funding led by Jack Dorsey. Its key milestones include: May 2024 relocation to El Salvador; April 2025 partnership with Tether to direct hashrate and deploy DATUM software globally; November 2025 SOC 2 Type 1 and March 2026 SOC 1 Type 1 attestations. In August 2026, following the BIP-110 hard fork, Dashjr departed to found CONVOY, and Bob Burnett was appointed board chair. The pool's DATUM protocol enables miners to construct their own block templates, and its TIDES payout system ensures transparent, auditable rewards directly from the network, reinforcing its mission of decentralization and censorship resistance.
Co-founders: Mark Artymko (President), Luke Dashjr (Chairman/CTO), Ian Northon (Chief Legal Officer). Core executives: Nacho Pauls (CCO), Nick Watkins (CFO), Jason Hughes (VP Engineering).
Mark Artymko: power systems engineer with 18 years in high-voltage grid design; Bitcoiner since 2021. Luke Dashjr: prominent Bitcoin Core developer, creator of OCEAN mining pool, advocates decentralization. Ian Northon: federal trial lawyer, Bitcoiner since 2013, anti-fraud expert. Nacho Pauls: Argentine-born former athlete, 20+ years in sales. Nick Watkins: seasoned CFO (FCCA), ex-Goldman Sachs/UBS/Investec. Jason Hughes: engineering lead, emphasizes non-custodial, transparent mining.