OCEAN Mining has completed a buyout of co-founder and veteran Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, ending his ownership and leadership roles at the Bitcoin mining pool. According to a joint statement dated Aug. 29 from Cheyenne, Wyoming, Dashjr resigned as chairman, chief technology officer, and director, while OCEAN repurchased all of his equity. The financial terms of the repurchase, the remaining ownership structure, and successor appointments were not disclosed.
The statement, issued by OCEAN parent Mummolin Inc. and Dashjr, tied the separation to different visions for the future of Bitcoin mining following recent protocol developments. OCEAN said it will continue operating as a transparent, non-custodial mining pool, while Dashjr will pursue a new mining venture called CONVOY. At the time of reporting, CONVOY had not published an endpoint, codebase, participating miners, infrastructure, fees, or block-template policy, and no transfer of miners or staff other than Dashjr was disclosed.
OCEAN remains a measurable but relatively small part of Bitcoin’s hashrate. A Mempool.space snapshot at 07:07 UTC on Aug. 30 attributed four of the previous 163 Bitcoin blocks to OCEAN, equal to 2.45%, or roughly 24.57 exahashes per second. A trailing-week view attributed 29 of 1,007 blocks to OCEAN, or 2.88%, with about 25.33 EH/s of hashrate. Those figures describe hashpower directed to OCEAN, not mining machines owned by the company.
Dashjr has long advocated changes to Bitcoin’s rules and was central to earlier controversy over the BIP-110 proposal, which sought to restrict certain inscriptions on the network. OCEAN added dedicated BIP-110 and no-signal endpoints in July, then returned its default endpoint to the non-BIP-110 chain on Aug. 9. However, the separation statement did not explicitly name BIP-110, Bitcoin Knots, a proof-of-work change, or another proposal as the cause of the split.
The departure removes a prominent protocol voice from the pool he helped launch in 2023 as a self-custody alternative to dominant custodial operators. Both ventures now compete for a small pool of miners that prioritize self-custody and transparency, but the practical impact on mining decentralization will only become clear over time if a functioning CONVOY pool emerges or OCEAN’s share changes sustainably.
