Bitcoin mining pool OCEAN announces co-founder Luke Dashjr has left the company after mutual agreement
OCEAN repurchased all shares held by Luke Dashjr
The Bitcoin mining pool OCEAN announced that co-founder Luke Dashjr has left the company after mutual agreement and has resigned from his positions as chairman, chief technology officer, and director.
The operating entity of OCEAN, Mummolin, stated that the company has repurchased all shares held by Dashjr; the announcement did not disclose the repurchase price, valuation, payment method, share ratio, or transaction completion date, making it impossible to calculate the actual scale of this exit transaction.
The separation is attributed to differing visions regarding the future path of Bitcoin mining following recent developments in Bitcoin protocols. The announcement did not further clarify whether the disputes involved transaction selection, block template generation, Stratum protocol, miner review rights, transaction fee markets, or specific technical positions on protocol upgrades.
Dashjr will launch a new project called CONVOY, which he stated will continue the mission of decentralizing Bitcoin mining. Currently, public information has not disclosed CONVOY's financing situation, equity structure, mining pool architecture, hash power scale, launch time, fee arrangements, or verifiable miner access data.
OCEAN stated it will continue to provide transparent, non-custodial mining pool services. The focus of the non-custodial model is on miners generating block templates independently or gaining greater control over templates, reducing reliance on large centralized mining pools to unilaterally decide transaction packaging and block composition; the recent adjustments in the company's leadership and equity structure do not mean that mining pool operations have ceased.
In terms of market mechanisms, miners' choice of mining pools mainly depends on yield stability, fee rates, payment methods, block generation rates, denial-of-service protection, block template control, and compliance risks. If CONVOY attracts miners with a stronger narrative of decentralization, it will compete with OCEAN for hash power willing to bear the costs of technical switching; if OCEAN maintains stable operations and a transparent non-custodial positioning, existing miners are more likely to prioritize the continuity of their payments. The migration of hash power between pools will not directly change Bitcoin issuance rules, but the concentration of hash power will affect transaction packaging rights, block construction rights, and network censorship resistance.
Source: Public information
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Luke Dashjr has long been part of the technical camp advocating for Bitcoin core development and small blocks. He maintains the Bitcoin Knots client and has opposed the expansion of block size; during the 2017 SegWit and block size debates, he supported Segregated Witness and maintaining stricter on-chain resource limits. His technical path does not solely pursue throughput but emphasizes the operability of full nodes, conservative changes to protocol rules, and censorship resistance. OCEAN, launched by Mummolin in 2023, differentiated itself by leveraging Dashjr's long-standing stance on decentralized mining pools, Stratum V2, and autonomy over block templates.
In terms of capital pathways, OCEAN has sought to extract some power from the traditional mining pool model of "aggregating hash power - uniformly constructing blocks - distributing rewards by share," attempting to allow miners to retain more choices in transactions and control over block templates. Dashjr's departure and the company's repurchase of all shares mean that this technical philosophy will no longer be realized through OCEAN's corporate governance structure, product roadmap, and equity interests; CONVOY will become a new vehicle for reorganizing software, miner access, and mining pool incentives. Both parties continue to use the language of "decentralized mining," but the future competition is not over the same batch of Bitcoin, but rather who can construct blocks, who provides coordination services, and who controls the infrastructure for miner access.
Historically, this is similar to the industry differentiation following the 2017 Bitcoin scaling debate: miners, node operators, wallet service providers, and exchanges may superficially share the same Bitcoin chain but could form different camps around block capacity, software clients, and protocol upgrades. It can also be compared to the changes driven by Stratum V2: traditional mining pools control block templates, while miners primarily sell hash rates; a more decentralized architecture attempts to allow miners to not only provide hash power but also participate in template selection. OCEAN and CONVOY are now in a phase of splitting from a common founding team into parallel infrastructure projects, and their ability to attract hash power depends not only on ideology but also on stable yields, software reliability, and miner switching friction.
Essentially, this is a reconstruction of the industry chain: the value of Bitcoin mining is not determined solely by ASICs and electricity; mining pools act as a power aggregation layer between "hash rate - candidate blocks - transaction ordering - block rewards." Miners gather in pools to reduce income volatility, and pools thus gain influence over block construction and transaction filtering; the goal of decentralized mining pool architecture is to redistribute this power without sacrificing yield smoothing. The split of the founders indicates that after protocol changes, different participants have inconsistent answers on whether this power should remain with miners, pool coordinators, or at the software layer, and the competitive outcome will be determined by the actual hash power migrated by miners, rather than slogans.
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