Tether partners with Ocean Mining Pool to diversify Bitcoin Block construction

Stablecoin Issuer Tether announced it intends to deploy existing and future Bitcoin hashrates into Ocean’s Bitcoin mining pool to enhance network decentralization.

“The deployment to hashrates is in line with both mining investments and a broader mission to strengthen Bitcoin against concentration,” Tether CEO Paolo Aldoino said in a statement on April 15th.

Although the Bitcoin hashrate is decentralized, the block construction process carried out by the mining pool is centralized primarily by several dominant actors, particularly Foundry USA, Antpool and VIABTC.

The Ocean Protocol attempts to distribute this process by allowing miners to build their own block templates using the open source datum protocol.

Tether’s deployment will utilize Ocean’s Datum software across all mining operations around the world, including rural African regions.

“By enabling unique block templates in the field and aggregating thousands of rig connections with low latency performance, Datum ensures global competitiveness while promoting geographical and operational diversity,” says Tether.

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Tether currently deploys Bitcoin hashrates on sites in Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador. There is also a $144 billion Stablecoin publisher headquartered there.

These initiatives came around the time Tether announced that he would invest $500 million in Bitcoin mining in late 2023.

Ocean was created in 2023 by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashle and is supported by block CEO Jack Dorsey and others. Ocean also moved its headquarters to El Salvador in May 2024.

Dashjr sparked controversy in December 2023 when it denounced users of the Bitcoin Ordinance to clog the network with “spam.” However, he rebutted the claim that the ocean censored transactions like inappropriate tokens.

The ocean still has a lot of market share to capture

According to data from Mempool.space, marine protocols are currently mined between 0.2% and 1% of the Bitcoin block.

Last week we mined nine blocks. This includes two consecutive 892342 on April 14th and 892343.

However, Ocean’s production is part of what Foundry USA, Antpool and VIABTC saw, mining 331, 199 and 161 Bitcoin blocks, respectively, over the same time frame. It accounts for more than 66% of all blocks.

The Tether Partnership could provide a much-needed boost to the hashrate of the ocean, which has reached 18.3 exahash per second in the last 24 hours.

By comparison, the hashrate for Foundry USA exceeds 298 EH/s over the same time frame, making use of hashrates such as Bitcoin Mining Firms Hut 8, Bitdeer, and BitFarms.

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