Ocean Mining Gives Non-DATUM Miners a BIP 110 Vote With New Stratum Endpoints
Ocean Mining, the non-custodial Bitcoin mining pool co-founded by Luke Dashjr and Mark Artymko, announced new Stratum endpoints this week that give every miner on the pool a direct say in whether to signal support for BIP 110, a contested soft fork proposal that would tighten Bitcoin's rules around non-monetary data.
WHAT OCEAN ANNOUNCED
The pool added two dedicated Stratum endpoints alongside its existing default. Miners who want to signal support for BIP 110 can direct their hash to one endpoint; miners who do not want to signal can use the other. The move was designed specifically for the roughly 5% of Ocean's hash rate that had been using the pool's standard template rather than DATUM, Ocean's flagship block-template protocol.
Mark Artymko, Ocean's co-founder and president, explained the rationale on the Simply Bitcoin Live show: the pool already had over 90% of its hash rate running DATUM, which by design lets every miner build their own block template and choose their own signaling preference. The new endpoints extended that same choice to the remaining miners who were not running DATUM and had previously had no mechanism to express a preference either way.
WHAT DATUM IS AND WHY IT MATTERS
Ocean was founded by Luke Dashjr, one of Bitcoin's longest-serving Core developers, and Bitcoin Mechanic, a seasoned Bitcoin mining expert. Launched in November 2023 with a $6.2 million seed round led by Jack Dorsey, Ocean was built on a single radical premise: miners, not pools, should decide what goes into blocks.
DATUM (Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining) is the protocol that operationalizes that premise. Under DATUM, the miner runs a full Bitcoin node, builds their own block template, populates their own mempool, and sends their hash rate to Ocean. Ocean's role is reduced to coordinating the payout split. With DATUM, the pool is mathematically blind to the miner's template contents, seeing only merkle branches. This makes censorship by the pool architecturally impossible, not just policy-based.
The top three pools combined exceed 55% of total hashrate. When a handful of pool operators decide which transactions are included in blocks, Bitcoin's censorship resistance is compromised. Governments can pressure two or three companies to filter transactions, enforce blacklists, or comply with sanctions at the protocol level.
WHAT BIP 110 PROPOSES
BIP 110 is a proposed Bitcoin soft fork that limits how much arbitrary data a transaction can carry. Supporters frame it as a defense of Bitcoin's role as sound money. Critics frame it as censorship with real chain-split risk.
In technical terms, the proposal caps transaction output data at 34 bytes and restricts OP_RETURN usage to 83 bytes. It would make it significantly harder to embed images, tokens, and other non-monetary content directly on Bitcoin's base layer. The proposal is authored under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm, with developer Luke Dashjr credited for the original draft and advice.
Miner signaling sits under 1% as of July 2026, but a mandatory signaling window near block 961,632 forces the issue in early August. Activation follows at block 965,664, with a projected date near September 1, 2026.
THE CONTROVERSY AND OCEAN'S RESPONSE
The announcement drew criticism online, with some claiming the decision to set a BIP 110-signaling default for the remaining non-DATUM miners amounted to coercion. Artymko acknowledged on the show that the messaging around the default choice could have foregrounded the fact that the vast majority of the pool already had a free choice through DATUM, and that the new endpoints were specifically for the smaller subset that did not.
His core defense was straightforward: every other major mining pool gives miners no choice at all. Pool operators build the block template and miners rent their hash rate into whatever the pool decides. Ocean is the only pool that gives miners the tools to build their own templates and control their own signaling. Offering two labeled endpoints and allowing miners to pick one is a meaningful expansion of sovereignty, not a curtailment of it.
As of early 2026, Ocean commands roughly 2% of global Bitcoin hashrate, modest by the standards of behemoths like Foundry or AntPool, but significant in terms of ideological impact. Artymko also addressed a question that often gets lost in the BIP 110 debate: even if Ocean grew to a much larger share of global hash rate, the decentralization properties would hold, because the intelligent part of mining (template construction, transaction selection, signaling) would still rest with thousands of individual miners, not with Ocean itself.
The specific unresolved question is whether BIP 110 can reach the 55% miner-signaling threshold before the August flag-day window, or whether the UASF enforcement path will arrive with mining support still well below that bar and force a resolution that the broader mining industry has not explicitly endorsed.
