Bitcoin’s decentralized mining is gaining ground with this pool

Since 2025 began, Bitcoin’s mining pool (BTC) Ocean successfully prosecuted 51 blocks.

On March 18, that pool, which uses the Datum Mining Protocol (in Spanish means “decentralized alternative templates for universal mining”) found its latest blocks in the network created by Nakamoto, at height 888418 and 888283, consuming a total of 8 blocks in the last 7 days. This information is extracted from the Mempool site:

That March 18, Munich International Mining, a miner who participates in Ocean and found block 888283, published in X highlighting autonomy which offers the protocol that pool and datum:

«We find Block 888283 of Bitcoin! And guess what? We build the block template! This is only possible with Ocean_mining datum. If you are undermining, you should do the same. Do not leave it in the hands of others, take control!».

Munic International Mining, 1.

Also, on March 14, another user of X, MRMASTERNODE, also Bitcoin miner in Ocean, stressed the advantages of this approach: «This is a better way to undermine Bitcoin and Bitcoin alone and ensure decentralization As Satoshi Nakamoto imagined her. The centralized pools and their templates are a weak point today. Fortunately, Ocean created Datum to solve this problem.

Both testimonies point to a change in the way of understanding mining, prioritizing individual control and censorship resistance that traditional pools can exercise to Prioritize transactions that they want.

Ocean uses his own protocol, Datum

The Pool Ocean, launched in the late 2023, used the Stratum V2 (SV2) protocol, as reported cryptootics. From that moment until September 29, 2024, Ocean found 71 blocks throughout that period.

However, since that September 29, when this pool implemented its own protocol, Datum, Ocean managed to process 120 blocks until todayevidencing a notable increase in its activity.

Why did the ocean -undermined block rate increased with Datum?

A quick answer to that question is the positive evolution of Ocean hashrate since the implementation of its Datum protocol at the end of last September. Currently, the hash rate of this pool is 3.98 EH/S (icahashes per second), contributing 0.5% of the total hashrat of the Pools to the Bitcoin Network, according to the Mempool site. While Bitcoin mining is a random process, a greater hashrate increases the chances of carrying out that successful practice.

Datum favored the adoption of miners in the Pool Ocean

The increase in Ocean’s hashrate coincided with Datum’s implement increased the pool hash rate.

On the other hand, despite the fact that a pool that implements SV2, such as Demand Pool, can also encourage decentralized mining by taking advantage of functions such as «work negotiation», which allows miners to select the transactions that make up their block templates, Datum would offer a key advantage to those individual miners. And, with this protocol, those miners transmit their blocks directly to the network from its own Bitcoin nodeswithout Pool intervention, according to the specialized site The Mining Pod.

Thanks to this, Datum would grant lower levels of latency When transmitting blocks, by eliminating intermediaries. It would also offer users greater decentralization and greater control over your privacy. This augmented privacy is due to the fact that miners only share the Merkle branch of their transactions with the pool and not the complete transactions. The Merkle branch is a data structure that allows verifying the integrity of a data set without revealing its content.

By eliminating the dependence of a central pool to transmit the blocks, the risk of centralization is reduced and the decentralization of the network is strengthened. Additionally, because Datum does not share complete transactions with a pool, miners can better protect their privacy, since Merkle’s branch does not reveal specific information about transactions.

By offering a tool like Datum, Ocean favors decentralization because he moves that responsibility to individual miners, reducing the risk of censorship or manipulation by a central entity. These conditions could have encouraged a greater adoption of users to the pool.

The impact of this approach has been highlighted by Luke Dashjr, CTO de Ocean, who on January 26 sentenced:

«Brains and Viaabtc are just bitmain disguised. F2pool Choose does not undermine transactions to or from a black list not revealed. Only Ocean allows you to undermine alone and still get the complete benefits of the rewards of a pool.»

Luke Dashjr, Programmer and CTO of Ocean.

Ocean bets on a bitcoin mining without power concentration

A mining template, in the context of Bitcoin, is the plane that miners use to put together a candidate blockselecting Mempool transactions, together with data such as the previous hash and a nonce To solve the cryptographic problem. Its function is to define which transactions integrate the block and in which order, allowing to compete for the reward, which combines 3.125 BTC after the halving, plus the rates by transaction.

However, this selection is crossed with the maximum removable value (MEV), a concept that, as Cryptoics explained, reflects how miners can manipulate templates to maximize profits, prioritizing high rates transactionslike those of Ordinals, or reorganizing past blocks if the rates justify it.

This raises a problem for the decentralization and security of Bitcoin. In traditional pools with Stratum V1 or FPPS («Full Pay-Per-Share»)operators centralize the templates, deciding what to include and be able to censor transactions or exploit the MEV, leaving miners without control.

For its part, Stratum V2 improves this by allowing templates to negotiate, but the pool continues to mediate. Datum, adopted by Ocean, gives total autonomy: Miners create and transmit templates from their nodesreducing the power of pool and the risk of censorship. However, the MEV persists as threat: if individual miners seek more value, they could favor profitable transactions, affecting the equity and stability of the network.

Thus, the templates are essential, but their handling exposes tensions. Pools centralization facilitates practices such as MEV, while options like Datum seek to counteract them. Even so, economic incentive could divert Bitcoin from its decentralized spirit, a challenge that remains in debate.