Ocean Buys Out Luke Dashjr as the Two Split Over Mining's Future

Luke Dashjr has left Ocean, the bitcoin mining pool he co-founded in 2023, and the company has bought back every share he held. He resigned as chairman, chief technology officer and director. A joint statement dated 29 August, issued from Cheyenne, Wyoming, said the separation was by mutual agreement and reflected different visions for the future of bitcoin mining after what it called the recent protocol developments. It named no proposal. Neither side put a price on the equity, and neither has said what portion of the company it was.

"Luke Dashjr, a co-founder of the pool, will pursue a new venture, CONVOY, continuing the mission to decentralize Bitcoin mining," the joint statement said.

The protocol developments nobody names

Filling in that blank is where the accounts part. CoinDesk, writing on Monday morning, dates the departure to a sabbatical Dashjr took in mid-August after BIP-110 failed, a proposal that would have restricted the temporary storage of non-financial data on the chain. Blockonomi puts the same proposal at the center and adds numbers to it: support peaked near 2.6% of network hashrate against a 55% activation threshold, and enforcing nodes rejected non-signaling blocks at height 961,632. Those figures sit in one account. CryptoSlate says plainly that the statement named neither BIP-110 nor Bitcoin Knots, the node software Dashjr maintains. The sequence is documented. The causation is not confirmed by either party.

Ocean's own position on the proposal moved twice. It added dedicated BIP-110 support in July and set its default back to the non-BIP-110 chain on 9 August, according to CryptoSlate, which is alone on both dates. The minority fork that followed mined two blocks in eight hours and then stalled.

What Ocean is, in numbers

Ocean launched in November 2023 on a $6.2 million seed round, positioned as a successor to Eligius, the early pool Dashjr founded before it. It is non-custodial, pays miners directly, and its DATUM protocol lets an individual miner build its own block template while still mining in the pool. crypto.news names Jack Dorsey as the round's lead investor and is alone in doing so. On hashrate the readings differ. CryptoSlate, citing Mempool.space at 07:07 UTC on Sunday, gives 4 of 163 blocks on the day and 29 of 1,007 across the week, or 2.88%, and estimates 24.57 to 25.33 exahashes per second. Blockonomi gives a flat 25.33 exahashes for the week of 24 August, with the same 2.88% weekly share. One is a range, one is a point, and neither outlet reconciles the two.

Convoy has a name and little else

The new venture was announced with a handle and a mission line. CryptoSlate found it had not published enough to verify an operating pool: no endpoints, no codebase, no participating miners, no fee schedule. crypto.news adds that there is no website, no documentation, no timeline and no funding detail. Ocean has not named a replacement chairman or chief technology officer, and has not said how his technical work will be divided. crypto.news also reports Tether's hashrate commitment to Ocean, announced in April 2025, as unchanged, and no other account here addresses it. Ocean says it will keep running the pool as before.

Whether hash power follows

What Dashjr leaves is 2.88% of weekly blocks. What he takes is a name and an argument he has been making for a decade, that mining decides too much from too few places. CoinDesk notes that Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool between them mine over half of recent blocks, a figure it carries alone, and that listed miners are steering capital toward artificial-intelligence hosting instead of hashrate. The 110-point case against the proposal that preceded the split came from a corporate treasury holder, not a miner, and the outcome was settled by hashrate that never showed up. Ocean keeps the pool, the seed money and the miners. Convoy has to find all three.