OCEAN (Mining Pool)

OCEAN is a Bitcoin mining pool that launched in late 2023, co-founded by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr and backed by a seed round led by Jack Dorsey. Its stated mission is structural: reduce the trust a miner must place in a pool operator, on the argument that pools have quietly become one of Bitcoin's most centralized layers. OCEAN attacks that on two fronts — custody of the money and control of the block template — and both mechanisms are verifiable rather than promised.

Non-custodial payouts

OCEAN is designed to be non-custodial: when the pool finds a block, the coinbase transaction itself pays participating miners' wallet addresses directly, so the pool never takes custody of the bitcoin it distributes. This is a structural difference from custodial pools, which accumulate balances in a pool wallet and pay out later — an arrangement that exposes miners to operator insolvency, withheld withdrawals, and account freezes. The design has practical edges worth knowing: coinbase space is finite, so payouts below a threshold are carried forward until they are large enough to earn a coinbase slot, and miners receive newly generated coins straight from the block — a payout path with no intermediary balance sheet in it at all.

TIDES payout accounting

OCEAN's payout scheme is called TIDES (Transparent Index of Distinct Extended Shares). It determines each miner's portion of a found block — including transaction-fee revenue — from an auditable rolling window of recorded shares, with the stated goal of avoiding the estimation and opacity of some pay-per-share variants. Because the share log and the window rules are published, a miner can independently recompute what they were owed rather than trusting a dashboard number. Like other score-over-a-window schemes, miners bear more block-finding variance than under pure pay-per-share; the trade is variance for verifiability.

DATUM and template construction

In September 2024 OCEAN released DATUM (Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining), a protocol that lets a miner running their own full node construct their own block template locally and mine it through the pool, rather than hashing a template chosen by the operator. Transaction selection — deciding what gets into a block — is the pool power with real censorship implications, and DATUM moves it back to the individual miner while preserving pooled rewards. This places OCEAN inside the same broader push as Stratum V2's job declaration path: different protocol, same goal of decoupling hashrate aggregation from template authority. Miners who do not run a node can still mine to OCEAN's own templates, and the pool has published policy options around the templates it builds — a reminder that whoever builds the template decides its contents, which is exactly why pushing that choice to the edge matters.

The project carries a longer lineage than its 2023 launch date suggests: Dashjr previously operated Eligius, an early pool notable for paying miners directly in the coinbase transaction a decade before OCEAN revived and formalized the model. That history matters when weighing the design — non-custodial coinbase payouts are not an experiment but a pattern with years of operational precedent behind it. As with any pool, the numbers that matter to an operator remain concrete: fee structure, payout threshold and variance, template policy, and the verifiability of the share accounting, all of which OCEAN publishes for independent checking rather than asking miners to take on faith.

For a home operator, OCEAN's model pairs naturally with hardware pointed at a node you run yourself — the same philosophy that leads people to solo mining, but with pooled variance smoothing. For the broader context and the numbers on how concentrated pooled hashrate has become, see mining pool decentralization and the general entry on mining pools.

See live pool share in the pool centralization tracker.