OCEAN (Mining Pool)

OCEAN is a Bitcoin mining pool that launched in 2023, co-founded by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr and backed by a seed round led by Jack Dorsey. OCEAN is designed to be non-custodial: when the pool finds a block, the coinbase transaction 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 that hold balances and pay out from a pool wallet.

TIDES payout

OCEAN's payout scheme is called TIDES (Transparent Index of Distinct Extended Shares). It uses an auditable rolling window of recorded shares to determine each miner's portion of a found block, including transaction-fee revenue, with the stated goal of avoiding the estimation and opacity of some pay-per-share variants.

DATUM and block templates

In September 2024 OCEAN released DATUM (Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining), which lets a miner running a full node construct its own block template locally and submit it to the pool, rather than hashing a template chosen by the operator. This aims to move transaction-selection power back to individual miners while still pooling rewards.

For the broader context see mining pool decentralization and coinbase transaction.

See live pool share in the pool centralization tracker.