DATUM

DATUM (Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining) is a mining protocol developed by the OCEAN pool that lets individual miners construct their own block templates locally while still receiving smoothed, pooled payouts. It directly attacks one of Bitcoin's most serious centralization risks: the fact that a handful of large pools currently decide which transactions go into nearly every block. With DATUM, the entity deciding what goes in your block is you.

The problem it solves

In conventional pooled mining, the pool operator builds the block template and the miner grinds hashes on whatever transactions the pool chose. The miner supplies the work; the pool supplies the judgment. Because a majority of network hashrate flows through a few pools, those operators hold outsized power over transaction inclusion — a standing censorship vector, and one that regulators or attackers only need to lean on in a few places to affect the whole network. This is the core concern tracked under mining pool decentralization: hashrate can be widely distributed while template authorship stays dangerously concentrated. DATUM moves template construction back to the miner. You run your own full node and the DATUM Gateway software; your node selects transactions from your own mempool according to your own policy, and the pool's role shrinks to reward accounting and payout smoothing.

How it works in practice

The DATUM Gateway is open source and speaks three protocols at once. Toward your Bitcoin node, it pulls fresh work via getblocktemplate, so the template reflects your node's view of the network. Toward your hardware, it presents an ordinary Stratum V1 interface (with version-rolling ASICBoost support), which is why existing ASICs connect without firmware changes — the fleet does not know anything unusual is happening. Toward OCEAN, it reports share data over an encrypted channel so your contribution can be measured and paid. The block you assemble is effectively a solo-mined block — your node, your transaction selection, your coinbase constraints — but your revenue is pooled and smoothed, giving you decentralized template control without solo mining's brutal payout variance. DATUM went live on OCEAN in 2024 and runs on real production hashrate today.

DATUM and Stratum V2

DATUM is not the only attempt to decentralize template authorship. Stratum V2 pursues the same goal through its Job Declaration protocol, where a miner-side template provider proposes work and negotiates it with the pool. The philosophical difference is instructive: SV2's job declaration is a negotiation — the pool can reject a proposed template — while DATUM is closer to a declaration of independence, purpose-built by OCEAN so that template selection is not subject to pool veto. Both approaches require the thing that actually confers sovereignty: a full node you run yourself. That requirement is the honest cost of the model — hardware, bandwidth, and the operational discipline to keep a node healthy — and it is also precisely the point.

The economics deserve one honest sentence: building your own templates does not, by itself, change your expected revenue — a well-constructed local template collects essentially the same fees a competent pool template would. What changes is who decides. The miner accepts node-running costs in exchange for censorship resistance, and the network gains another independent template author — value that does not show up on your payout statement but absolutely shows up in Bitcoin's threat model.

For the home miner or small operation, DATUM converts an ideological preference into a practical setup choice: a modest node, one gateway daemon, and your existing ASICs are enough to take transaction selection back from the pool layer. Every miner who does so removes one more slice of block construction from the handful of entities that dominate it — one more layer decentralized, which is the entire game.