Ocean President Mark Artymko On Mining Pool's Path Forward After Luke Dashjr's Exit
Ocean, the Bitcoin mining pool built around letting miners construct their own blocks, just lost one of its founders. President Mark Artymko joined the show to explain what changed and what didn't.
A LEADERSHIP SHAKEUP AT THE MINING POOL
Ocean's co-founder had stepped down from his roles as chairman, chief technology officer and director. OCEAN co-founder Luke Dashjr left the Bitcoin mining pool on Aug. 29 after reaching a mutual separation agreement with its parent company, Mummolin Inc., resigning as chairman, chief technology officer and director. Mummolin repurchased all of Dashjr's equity, ending his ownership interest in the Bitcoin mining pool entirely.
Both sides described the split as mutually agreed, citing differing views on Bitcoin mining's future direction and recent protocol changes. The resignation comes weeks after Dashjr took leave following the failure of his BIP-110 proposal, a contested initiative that sought to restrict non-financial data storage on Bitcoin. Following his departure from Ocean, Dashjr plans to launch a new mining venture called Convoy. Artymko said on the show that a second executive, the company's VP of client success, resigned the same day, though that departure hasn't been independently confirmed outside the show.
Artymko was clear that nothing changes for miners on the pool. The rest of the team, including engineering lead Jason Hughes, is staying, and Ocean's mission hasn't shifted.
WHAT DATUM ACTUALLY DOES
Ocean's core product is a protocol the live captions rendered as "Datam," but its real name is DATUM. DATUM (Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining) is OCEAN pool's answer to the block template centralization problem. Instead of a handful of pools deciding which transactions go into the next block, DATUM lets individual miners run their own node and build their own block template locally, then hand the finished work to the pool only for payout coordination.
Artymko's pitch is that decentralization doesn't require Ocean to stay small. Even if Ocean became a majority of network hash rate, the pool itself still wouldn't control block contents, because the mining decision happens on the miner's own hardware before it ever reaches Ocean's servers.
OPEN SOURCING THE PROTOCOL
Ocean is planning to open source the pool-side half of DATUM, making the software available to every mining pool, not just its own. Artymko said the team is also in early talks with the Stratum V2 community about collaborating rather than competing, since both efforts are aimed at the same goal: moving block construction out of the hands of a small number of pool operators.
THE ECONOMIC CASE: MORE BITCOIN PER EXAHASH
Artymko argued the pitch isn't purely ideological. Based on Ocean's 2025 operating data, miners on the pool earned roughly 3.6 percent more Bitcoin than they would have on a typical full-pay-per-share pool, which works out to an extra 6.27 BTC per exahash of hash rate annually. He attributed the gap to two things: the cost pools built around guaranteed payouts price into their fee structure, and the bandwidth inefficiency of routing every miner's work through a centralized stratum connection instead of building templates locally.
THE BOARD AND WHAT COMES NEXT
Ocean's board includes two well-known names in Bitcoin mining. Bob Burnett, founder and CEO of Barefoot Mining, spent over 40 years as a technologist including 13 years at Gateway, Inc. as Chief Technical Officer, and serves on the Board of Directors at Ocean. The other is Rapha Zagury, who currently serves as CEO of Twenty One Capital while remaining founder of Elektron Energy, one of the larger private Bitcoin miners.
Artymko's target is to grow Ocean's hash rate toward 100 exahash by the end of the year, up from roughly 25 exahash today, while pushing other pools toward DATUM or Stratum V2 so the decentralization doesn't depend on any single pool's size. The company's stated position on Bitcoin's proof-of-work fight hasn't moved either: Ocean is staying on SHA-256 and isn't backing a fork.
This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.
