Key Takeaways:
OCEAN Mining bought out co-founder Luke Dashjr, ending his ownership and three leadership roles at the Bitcoin pool, per an Aug. 29 joint statement.
Dashjr resigned as chairman, chief technology officer and director, while OCEAN repurchased all of his equity, according to the joint statement from OCEAN and Dashjr. Holding those board, technical and executive positions had placed him at the center of both OCEAN's governance and its mining-policy decisions.
The private company did not disclose the repurchase price, its remaining ownership structure or successor appointments. OCEAN said it will continue operating its transparent, non-custodial pool, while Dashjr will pursue a new mining venture called CONVOY.
At the reporting cutoff, CONVOY had not published enough to verify an operating pool. Its public profile and the announcement disclosed no endpoint, codebase, participating miners, infrastructure, fees or block-template policy, nor any transfer of miners, staff other than Dashjr, or infrastructure from OCEAN.
A Mempool.space snapshot at 07:07 UTC on Aug. 30 attributed four of the previous 163 Bitcoin blocks to OCEAN, equal to 2.45%. Applying that share to the endpoint's network hashrate estimate produced a block-share-derived estimate of about 24.57 exahashes per second.
The longer window was similar. Mempool.space attributed 29 of 1,007 trailing-week blocks to OCEAN, or 2.88%, while its latest weekly hashrate row put the pool at 25.33 EH/s and 2.86% of the network. Across both windows, OCEAN remained within a broad 2.5% to 3% band that makes miner departures measurable without turning a single block into a trend.
Those figures describe hashpower directed to OCEAN, not mining machines owned by the company. A trailing 24-hour window can also move quickly as blocks enter and leave the sample, making it a snapshot rather than durable market share.
The joint statement said the separation reflected different visions following recent protocol developments, but it did not name BIP-110, Bitcoin Knots, a proof-of-work change or another proposal as the cause. OCEAN added dedicated BIP-110 and no-signal endpoints in July, then returned its default endpoint to the non-BIP-110 chain on Aug. 9 while keeping both choices live. OCEAN said its DATUM system let participating miners control block construction.
The split follows a turbulent period around BIP-110, which sought temporary consensus restrictions on certain non-financial data embedded in Bitcoin transactions. Miner support for the proposal peaked near 2.6% of network hashrate, far below the 55% threshold sought by backers, according to Blockonomi. Enforcing nodes began rejecting non-signaling blocks at height 961,632, and the minority branch produced only two blocks before stalling.
OCEAN launched in November 2023 after parent Mummolin raised $6.2 million in seed funding led by Jack Dorsey, with Accomplice and Barefoot Bitcoin Fund among the investors. The pool was positioned as a successor to the Eligius mining pool, with direct payouts designed to reduce operator control over miners' block rewards.
A functioning CONVOY pool, published mining instructions or a sustained change in OCEAN's share would provide the first measurable evidence that miners and template policy are moving. The corporate split alone does not. Bitcoin traded at $78,799, up 1.03% over 24 hours, as of the Aug. 30 snapshot.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
