Stablecoin issuer Tether has announced it intends to deploy its existing and future Bitcoin hashrate to OCEAN's Bitcoin mining pool

Deploying hashrate to OCEAN aligns with both our mining investments and our broader mission to fortify Bitcoin against centralizing forces

Stablecoin issuer Tether is planning to deploy its existing and future Bitcoin hashrate to OCEAN’s Bitcoin mining pool in a bid to strengthen the network’s decentralization.

Announced on Friday, the partnership will also see Tether integrate OCEAN’s DATUM protocol for structuring blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain.

While Bitcoin’s hashrate is decentralized, the block-building process is largely centralized by a few dominant actors — most notably Foundry USA, AntPool and ViaBTC.

The OCEAN protocol attempts to decentralize this process by empowering miners to build their own block templates using its open-source DATUM protocol, reducing dependency on centralized intermediaries and enhancing censorship resistance, Tether said.

“Deploying hashrate to OCEAN aligns with both our mining investments and our broader mission to fortify Bitcoin against centralizing forces,” Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino said in a statement.

“We are continuously exploring avenues to mitigate the potential for abuse and maintain the integrity of the Bitcoin network.”

Tether’s deployment would see OCEAN’s DATUM software used across all of its mining operations in Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador.

“Enabling on-site generation of unique block templates and aggregating thousands of rig connections with low-latency performance, DATUM ensures global competitiveness while promoting geographic and operational diversity,” Tegether said.

Those initiatives come after Ardoino said in November that Tether would be investing $500 million into Bitcoin mining.

OCEAN was created by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr in 2023 and has since been backed by the likes of Block CEO Jack Dorsey. OCEAN also moved its headquarters to El Salvador in May.

Dashjr previously sparked controversy when he slammed Bitcoin Ordinals users for clogging up the network with “spam,” although he later shot down claims that his protocol was used to censor non-fungible token-like transactions.

OCEAN still has a lot of market share to capture

The OCEAN protocol currently mines around 0.2% to 1% of Bitcoin’s blocks, according to mempool.space data.

It has mined nine blocks over the last week, including two consecutively at 892342 and 892343 on April 13.

However, OCEAN’s output is a small fraction of that seen by Foundry USA, AntPool and ViaBTC, which have mined 331, 199 and 161 Bitcoin blocks, respectively, over the same timeframe — amounting to over 66% of all blocks.

The Tether partnership would likely provide a much-needed boost to OCEAN’s hashrate, which has amounted to 18.3 exahashes per second (EH/s) over the last 24 hours.

In comparison, Foundry USA’s hashrate over the same timeframe has exceeded 298 EH/s, leveraging hashrate from the likes of Hut 8, Bitdeer and Bitfarms.