Decentralized BTC mining pool OCEAN raises $6,2 million under Jack Dorsey’s leadership

What’s new? Jack Dorsey, the creator of X (formerly Twitter) and CEO of the blockchain company Block (formerly Square), has led a $6,2 million seed round of funding for Mummolin with participation from Accomplice, Barefoot Bitcoin Fund, MoonKite, NewLayer Capital, and Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. The funds will be used to launch the first non-custodial decentralized bitcoin mining pool called OCEAN. The co-founder of Mummolin is Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr.

Press release

What else is known? Mummolin co-founder and President Mark Artymko explained that traditional mining pools have the exclusive right to manage rewards for mined blocks and transaction fees before distributing them to miners. This gives them the ability to withhold payments at will or as required by law.

In addition, centralized pools can reject community decisions to conduct soft fork upgrades or not include individual transactions in blocks.

Thus, it became known earlier that the F2Pool pool was the first to start blocking transactions that violate the sanctions of the US Department of Justice. Since September, it has not included transactions subject to the restrictions in blocks.

OCEAN differs from traditional mining pools in that it does not store miners’ funds: they will receive rewards directly from the Bitcoin network. In addition, OCEAN’s mechanisms are completely transparent, and the pool is publicly available. Jack Dorsey added that the project is designed to solve the problem of centralization of mining pools, which harms the network of the first cryptocurrency.

The first participant in OCEAN will be Barefoot Mining.

In May, Block developed a prototype ASIC chip for BTC mining and announced that it would make its design technologies and software solutions publicly available. In this way, the company intends to solve the problem of concentration of mining equipment in the hands of several companies, which reduces the decentralization and stability of the Bitcoin network.

In November, a solo participant of the CKPool mining pool with a capacity of 2PH/s mined an entire block of bitcoin, earning $233 950. The pool team noted that a miner with this capacity typically mines a block only once every five years. In March and October, loners also mined entire blocks as part of CKPool.