Tether Joins Ocean Mining Pool to Boost Bitcoin Network Decentralisation

Tether will redirect its Bitcoin mining power to Ocean, a decentralised mining pool founded by core dev Luke Dashjr, to counter centralised block-building dominance.
The move aligns with Tether’s mission to support Bitcoin decentralisation and uses Ocean’s Datum protocol, enabling miners to generate their own block templates.

Tether (USDT) is moving its global Bitcoin mining power to Ocean, a decentralised mining pool launched by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr.

In an April 15 statement, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the deployment supports the company’s goal of “fortifying Bitcoin” against “centralizing forces”:

As a company committed to financial freedom and open access, we see supporting decentralization in Bitcoin mining as essential to the network’s long-term integrity. Deploying hashrate to OCEAN aligns with both our mining investments and our broader mission to fortify Bitcoin against centralizing forces.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino

Basically, Tether’s trying to chip away at the control of big mining pools like Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC, so they can get a bigger piece of the pie.

Tether ramped up its mining footprint in late 2023 with a massive US$500M (AU$787M) investment in infrastructure. The company’s mining operations are now all over the world, including Latin America, having recently set up a corporate base in El Salvador.

How It Will Work

Ocean’s modus operandi is simple: to decentralise Bitcoin block production by allowing miners to create their own block templates via its open-source Datum protocol, which Tether will use across its entire mining fleet, including operations in rural areas of Africa, Uruguay, Paraguay, and El Salvador.

A bit more on the Datum protocol: it enables local generation of block templates and supports thousands of low-latency mining connections, which Tether says helps boost global competitiveness while “promoting geographic and operational diversity”.

Ocean launched in 2023 with backing from Block CEO Jack Dorsey. The project moved its headquarters to —you guessed it— El Salvador in May 2024.

Ocean currently controls a fraction of the network’s block production, accounting for just 0.2% to 1% of mined Bitcoin blocks, per data from mempool.space. In the last week, Ocean mined nine blocks—two of them back-to-back—while Foundry USA alone mined 331.

Still, Tether’s support could help close that gap. Ocean’s hashrate over the past 24 hours stood at 18.3 EH/s, compared to Foundry’s 298 EH/s, powered by heavyweight miners like Hut 8, Bitdeer, and Bitfarms.

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