Luke Dashjr has left OCEAN, the Bitcoin mining pool he co-founded, weeks after miners on the pool used its own decentralized setup to reject BIP-110, the controversial Bitcoin fork he backed.
- OCEAN and Dashjr said in a Saturday press release they had separated by "mutual agreement," with Dashjr resigning as chairman, chief technology officer and director.
- Mummolin Inc., the company behind OCEAN, also repurchased all of his equity.
The unusually short joint statement gave little detail about what broke down. It said only that the separation reflected "different visions for the future of Bitcoin mining following the recent protocol developments." It didn't explicitly name BIP-110 or say the proposal caused Dashjr's departure.
But the timing follows one of the stranger episodes in OCEAN's short history.
OCEAN miners went their own way
BIP-110, formally called the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, sought to temporarily restrict several ways of putting arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions, drawing fierce pushback from parts of the community that saw it as unnecessary censorship and a risky attempt to change Bitcoin's rules.
The proposal required 55% miner signaling but also included a mandatory signaling period that could split enforcing nodes from miners that refused to signal. Its specification credits Dashjr with the "original draft and advice."
But the pool was also built around reducing the power mining pools normally have over individual miners.
Its DATUM protocol lets miners construct their own block templates while still pooling their computing power and sharing rewards through OCEAN. That meant individual OCEAN miners did not necessarily have to follow the pool's preferred Bitcoin rules.
As The Coinformer reported on Aug. 9, the split went well beyond a handful of dissenting miners. When The Coinformer checked OCEAN's live dashboards, its non-BIP-110 endpoint showed about 19.1 EH/s of three-hour hashrate, compared with just 1.36 EH/s on its BIP-110 endpoint.
Roughly 93.4% of the combined hashrate visible across the two fork-specific endpoints was therefore mining the chain that didn't enforce BIP-110's mandatory signaling rules.
- BIP-110 itself attracted only about 2.6% miner support at its peak, far below its 55% threshold.
- After enforcing nodes split from the dominant Bitcoin chain, the minority branch initially produced just two blocks before stalling while Bitcoin continued ahead.
Dashjr moves on
The dispute had already begun reshaping Dashjr's roles before Saturday's permanent split.
- On Aug. 11, Dashjr said he was taking a sabbatical from his positions as OCEAN chairman and CTO.
- Around the same time, he was removed as an editor of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository following a separate debate over his role there.
- Dashjr will now pursue CONVOY, a new venture that the joint statement says will continue his effort to decentralize Bitcoin mining.
- OCEAN, meanwhile, said it will continue operating as a transparent, non-custodial mining pool. Neither side disclosed the value of the equity repurchase or provided further details about CONVOY.
The departure also got some pretty spicy reactions from longtime Bitcoin figures.
- Peter Todd, a longtime Bitcoin developer, welcomed the split, writing in an X post that "OCEAN fills an important niche in Bitcoin mining. Hopefully without Luke weighing them down they can continue to serve that niche well."
- Dan Held, a Bitcoin investor and former Kraken marketing executive, went further, criticizing OCEAN's leadership for bringing Dashjr and fellow Bitcoin developer "Mechanic" into the company in the first place. "What an incredible level of gross negligence by the company, executives, and board," Held wrote.
- Luke de Wolf, a Bitcoin author and cybersecurity professional who co-founded the BTCHEL conference, described the separation on X as "a sad but necessary resolution of BIP-110 and the decision to fork off." He nevertheless defended the mining pool itself, saying OCEAN remained "an excellent force in the space" because it allows miners to build their own blocks and helps decentralize the network.
The Coinformer reached out to OCEAN for comments and will update the story once it responds.