The data is in. On a 12-month rolling basis, corroborated by multiple miners, OCEAN earns you more. +3.6% more Bitcoin earned on TIDES vs. FPPS Meaning every 1 Eh/s on OCEAN earned +6.27 BTC more than FPPS. Real numbers. Real value delivered. More for the miners. 💪🌊

@ocean_mining bringing the money bags💰to @btchelevent. Come to our booth to find out how much more money you could be making with OCEAN.

OCEAN is in Helsinki this week! Join @markartymko, @NachoPauls and @leo_haf as they visit the Nordics! Wednesday is the European Mining Summit: One day of discussions on mining, grid stability and what to do with surplus power. Friday and Saturday the main event @btchelevent: The Nordic Bitcoin Conference. Catch Mark and Nacho on the Main stage Friday and find the team at booths #1/#2 both days. See you in Helsinki.

OCEAN earns SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 Attestations The reports reinforce OCEAN’s commitment to transparent, dependable Bitcoin mining through independent examination of control design and operating effectiveness of OCEAN’s internal systems over the reporting periods. Link to the release: prnewswire.com/news-releases…

OCEAN has promoted Jason Hughes (@wk057) to Chief Technology Officer. Jason has spent nearly fifteen years writing software that Bitcoin miners depend on. At OCEAN, he wrote much of what makes this company worth choosing. He developed TIDES, our transparent and auditable reward system, and architected and built DATUM, which lets pooled miners construct block templates using their own Bitcoin nodes. OCEAN’s commitment to giving miners more control rests on engineering that Jason delivered. He came to that work with years of experience running Eligius, one of Bitcoin’s earliest major mining pools. After taking over its operation in 2012, he developed and maintained much of the software behind it while also operating a mining farm of his own. He understood the problems miners faced because they were his problems, too. Tesla got its own introduction to Jason’s abilities once. An investigation that began with his dissatisfaction with the car’s infotainment system eventually uncovered vulnerabilities reaching its worldwide vehicle fleet. During a demonstration for Tesla, he remotely moved a car in California from North Carolina after being given its VIN. He helped the company address the vulnerabilities and earned what was then its largest-ever bug bounty. We’d put Jason’s engineering record alongside anyone’s in Bitcoin. Having him lead OCEAN’s technology operations is an asset that will help us realize our mission of decentralization. Congratulations, Jason. Continually stoked to have you here. 🌊

Giacomo Zucco (@giacomozucco) has rejoined OCEAN’s Board of Directors. Giacomo has been part of OCEAN since the beginning, but his history with Bitcoin goes back much further. Since 2013, he has made a career out of pulling Bitcoin apart, explaining why it matters, and building the ecosystem around it. He has helped develop and advance open technical standards including BOLT, OpenTimestamps, RGB, and BDK; taught Bitcoin everywhere from university programs to Lugano’s Summer School and Cubo+; and advised major financial and infrastructure companies trying to understand what Bitcoin means for their businesses. Today, he leads Bitcoin education as VP of the Plan ₿ Foundation in Lugano and CEO of Plan ₿ Network, while continuing to invest in and advise Bitcoin companies across the ecosystem. He’s also a physicist and honorary consul. Because, as with Bitcoiners, of course he is. Giacomo has spent more than a decade approaching Bitcoin from just about every direction possible. He asks hard questions, holds strong views, and cares deeply about keeping Bitcoin decentralized, permissionless, and resistant to capture. This perspective has been part of OCEAN’s DNA from the start. We’re glad to have it back around the table. Welcome back, Giacomo. 🌊

⚡⚡ Lightning payouts are back at OCEAN. ⚡⚡ Lightning was paused over the last month due to incompatibility with the chain split. Now that this has been resolved, payments have resumed. What this means for you: • Accumulated Rewards: If you were previously set up for Lightning payouts, your accumulated rewards will be processed in upcoming batches through normal channels. If your rewards reach the natural threshold, they will be paid out on-chain. • Lower On-Chain Payout Threshold (Coming Soon): We’ve heard feedback from smaller miners that our on-chain threshold was too high. We are reducing that threshold from ~1 million sats to 500,000 sats to make frequent on-chain payouts easier for smaller miners who aren’t using Lightning. Note: This threshold change will take effect with an upcoming TIDES system update. Lightning is back, and a lower threshold is on the way. Keep building. 🚀

Last year I wrote about a concept for pools and solo miners to reduce variance without the steep cost of FPPS. With our announced intent to open-source DATUM Prime early next year and collaborate with the SV2 community, this “DATUM Layer” idea is within reach.

OCEAN's Board of Directors has elected Rapha Zagury (@RaphaZagury ) as a Director. Rapha is the CEO of Twenty One Capital (NYSE: XXI) and founder of Elektron Energy, one of the world's largest private Bitcoin miners. Before Bitcoin, he spent years in investment banking and capital markets at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank. Rapha has been in OCEAN's corner since the early days, long before joining the board. He believed in what we were building when decentralized mining was a much harder sell, and supported us with hashrate from the start. As a miner, Rapha deals with the same things our customers do every day: power costs, uptime, payouts, and pool economics. That keeps OCEAN grounded in what miners actually need. Welcome to the Board, Rapha. 🌊

OCEAN's Board of Directors has elected Bob Burnett (@boomer_btc) as Chairman.   Bob has been part of OCEAN from the beginning. He served on our founding Board, was the first miner to put hashrate behind the pool, and found OCEAN's first-ever block.   He brings something particularly valuable for OCEAN's next chapter: experience building and leading technology businesses at scale.   Before founding Barefoot Mining in 2017, Bob spent over 30 years in technology-centric endeavors, including 13 years at Gateway, a Fortune 200 company, where he served as CTO and EVP of Products, led thousands of employees, managed a multi-billion-dollar business, and helped guide one of the defining companies of the PC revolution.   Today, Bob is the founder and CEO of Barefoot Mining and has spent years working toward the same thing that brought OCEAN together in the first place: a more decentralized and resilient Bitcoin mining network.   He knows OCEAN. He knows mining. He knows what it takes to build a technology company for the long term.   We're proud to have Bob Burnett serve as Chairman as OCEAN enters its next chapter. 🌊

When you mine in a pool, you don't choose what goes in the block. The pool does. With OCEAN that changes. Miners using DATUM regain control of template construction, building the blocks they want mined. @MarkArtymko unpacks this with @BITVOLT 👇

If Bitcoin is going to stand any chance at surviving long-term, decentralized mining is crucial.

OCEAN's next chapter Bitcoin mining and block template construction have become concentrated in a small number of pools. When a handful of operators can decide which transactions make it into blocks, Bitcoin's censorship resistance increasingly depends on their goodwill rather than the design of the network. That is a security problem. We exist to fix it. What we're building. We built DATUM to put block template construction back in miners' hands. It is open source on the client side and will be open source on the pool side early next year. We will continue our effort integrating Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, for trustless payouts and for encouraging compatibility with the best available standards, features, tools. We will work with miners, partners, other pools, and protocol developers (like SV2) to make decentralization a priority for the next era of Bitcoin mining. Building your own template, permissionlessly, provides sovereignty to miners. Freedom to choose which transactions to include empowers all miners to act as a gateway for the free market to Bitcoin's blockspace. And doing it all locally on your own node cuts down bandwidth requirements enormously, while the TIDES payment system provides more direct exposure to the upside. More independent miners, making more independent decisions, using less bandwidth, and earning more Bitcoin (3.6% more on OCEAN in 2025, to be precise). Where we stand. Our pool remains on SHA-256. We are not adopting any proof-of-work change. To our miners. Nothing changes for you. Service and support continue uninterrupted. Nacho Pauls remains your first point of contact. The next chapter starts now. Let’s build! 🌊

OCEAN and Luke Dashjr announce today that, by mutual agreement, Luke Dashjr has separated from OCEAN, resigning as Chairman, Chief Technology Officer, and director. Link to the joint statement press release here: prnewswire.com/news-releases…

Update on BIP110 reimbursements: The rebate we previously announced has now been paid at the best FPPS rate for the affected period. Transaction ID: 1f83d838b17b43b5504aa7823d6e89cf662ff0d261f4326041f741c9294d17eb Followup on BIP110 endpoint announcement: A clarification seems necessary about the announcement above, which some interpreted as the disclosure of some novel issue with hashrate distribution among the two competing chains during the recent BIP110 controversy and chain-split. It's not. The post is just a direct follow-up to the decision taken and publicly announced more than one month ago, about giving the few non-DATUM hashers (who still prefer to delegate block template creation to the pool operator, rather than taking control of it themselves, 4% of OCEAN’s hashrate) the same choice over BIP110 signaling as the DATUM miners (96% of OCEAN hashrate): nitter.net/ocean_mining/status/20…. In that context, a choice was made to set the default Stratum endpoint to "pro-BIP". To be clear, this was not a statement of company advocacy for BIP110. At the time the decision was made, we were regularly hitting periods where more than 50% of OCEAN’s hashrate was actively signalling for BIP110, and we were fielding direct calls from customers telling us they were pro-BIP110 and asking how to signal. Setting the default accordingly was our attempt to have the endpoint at least resemble the expressed wishes of our own users at that moment. This choice of defaults was contested and somewhat controversial, but the main focus of the company was in giving all users a choice (which DATUM-wise was not a minor technical feat: some claimed it would have been impossible), and we were hopeful the number of users actually affected by the default would be minimal (even relative to the already small number of non-DATUM hashers). The way BIP110 unfolded confirmed this default choice as unfortunate, and the fact that some hashrate kept coming to that default endpoint, even after the BIP110 chain stalled out, seemed to corroborate that some hashers may have kept pointing to it due to a lack of information. That is why we processed the rebate above (some users who intentionally directed hashrate to the stalled chain may have also benefited from this, but our priority was to protect the uninformed ones).

Update for OCEAN miners: We want to clarify yesterday’s activity around the BIP-110 and non-BIP-110 mining options. For roughly 18 hours, some miners using OCEAN’s Stratum templates may have believed they were mining on the non-BIP-110 chain while their hashrate was directed to the BIP-110 chain. To eliminate any possibility that miners were disadvantaged, OCEAN will make a direct Bitcoin rebate payment to affected miners based on the rewards they would have earned on the non-BIP-110 chain during that window. Approximately 0.3 BTC will be distributed, with payments completed within the next 72 hours. We’ll publish the transaction details once the payments are sent. The default endpoint is now back on the non-BIP-110 chain. Both options remain available so every miner can choose where to direct their hashrate. Your hash. Your choice. 🌊