Tether Partners with Ocean Protocol to Strengthen Bitcoin’s Decentralization via Mining Hashrate Deployment

In a bid to combat the centralization of Bitcoin’s mining power, Tether has announced its intention to deploy its existing and future Bitcoin hashrate to Ocean Protocol, a decentralized Bitcoin mining pool. This partnership is part of Tether’s broader strategy to strengthen Bitcoin’s network and decentralize the mining process, which has become increasingly dominated by a few major players. Through this collaboration, Tether aims to improve the censorship resistance and geographical diversity of Bitcoin mining.

Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino stated in an April 15 announcement that deploying hashrate to Ocean aligns with the company’s mining investments and its mission to fortify Bitcoin against centralizing forces. While Bitcoin’s overall hashrate remains decentralized, the process of block building in mining pools is largely controlled by a handful of entities. The three biggest players in the space—Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC—dominate the mining pool ecosystem.

The Ocean Protocol, which is designed to decentralize the block-building process, uses its open-source Datum protocol to enable miners to create their own block templates, thus reducing reliance on centralized mining pools and enhancing censorship resistance. This, Tether believes, will help safeguard Bitcoin’s integrity as a decentralized and trustless financial network.

How Ocean’s Datum Protocol Enhances Mining Decentralization

Ocean’s Datum software ensures that block templates are created locally at mining sites, thereby empowering miners with the ability to contribute to Bitcoin’s block-building process independently. The software’s low-latency performance ensures that miners, regardless of their geographical location—including rural areas in Africa—can participate in the mining process with minimal delays and maximize global competitiveness.

Tether’s collaboration with Ocean will help deploy Datum across all of Tether’s mining operations, including those in countries such as Uruguay, Paraguay, and El Salvador, where the company is headquartered. This move represents a significant step towards enhancing the geographical and operational diversity of Bitcoin mining, promoting a more distributed mining ecosystem.

Tether’s interest in Bitcoin mining isn’t new. In late 2023, the company announced plans to invest $500 million into Bitcoin mining operations. The new partnership with Ocean Protocol is an extension of these efforts, and it leverages Tether’s existing mining operations in various parts of the world, including in countries with favorable regulations for Bitcoin mining, like El Salvador.

Tether’s push into Bitcoin mining and its deployment of hashrate through Ocean’s decentralized mining pool is part of its broader strategy to integrate more sustainable practices into the Bitcoin network. By diversifying its mining operations and utilizing advanced decentralized protocols like Datum, Tether hopes to reduce the power that centralized mining pools have over Bitcoin’s network and block production.

Ocean Protocol: A Rising Player in Bitcoin Mining

While Ocean Protocol is still a small player in the mining space compared to giants like Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC, it is steadily growing its presence. According to data from mempool.space, Ocean currently mines between 0.2% to 1% of all Bitcoin blocks. Over the last week, the protocol successfully mined nine blocks, including two consecutive blocks on April 14, 2025. However, this is still a fraction of the mining output seen from the largest mining pools, which together account for over 66% of all mined blocks.

Ocean’s current hash power is about 18.3 exahashes per second (EH/s), which, while impressive, is still far below the 298 EH/s of Foundry USA, the dominant player in the industry. Foundry, leveraging the hash power of mining firms like Hut 8, Bitdeer, and Bitfarms, remains a behemoth in the Bitcoin mining space.

Tether’s partnership with Ocean is expected to provide a major boost to the latter’s mining operations. With the added hashrate from Tether’s existing and future mining investments, Ocean is well-positioned to significantly increase its share of Bitcoin’s block production, helping to address the current dominance of centralized mining pools.

Tether’s support could also help Ocean expand its Datum protocol and further decentralize the process of Bitcoin block building. This would increase the resilience of Bitcoin against censorship and centralization threats, making the network more robust in the face of potential attacks or regulatory pressures.

Challenges Ahead: Centralization Still a Concern

Despite the potential benefits of Tether’s partnership with Ocean, the Bitcoin mining space remains highly centralized. The top three mining pools—Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC—continue to dominate the network. This centralization raises concerns about the potential for censorship and the risks of a single point of failure in the Bitcoin mining ecosystem.

The Ocean Protocol’s goal to decentralize Bitcoin’s block-building process by enabling miners to create their own block templates through the Datum protocol is a step in the right direction. However, Ocean still has a long way to go in terms of capturing a significant market share. As of now, it remains far behind the likes of Foundry USA, which has mined hundreds of Bitcoin blocks in the same time frame.

Nevertheless, Tether’s support and Ocean’s open-source approach could pave the way for a more decentralized and robust Bitcoin mining ecosystem. As more miners adopt the Datum protocol, the power of the dominant mining pools could be diluted, helping to level the playing field for smaller and more geographically diverse mining operations.

Tether’s move to deploy its Bitcoin hashrate to Ocean Protocol marks a significant step towards the decentralization of Bitcoin mining. By leveraging Ocean’s Datum protocol and promoting greater operational diversity, Tether is not only investing in Bitcoin mining but also contributing to the long-term health and decentralization of the Bitcoin network. This partnership offers an opportunity to reduce the concentration of power in the hands of a few dominant mining pools and improve Bitcoin’s resilience against centralizing forces.

As Bitcoin’s ecosystem continues to grow and evolve, collaborations like Tether’s with Ocean could play a crucial role in ensuring that Bitcoin remains a decentralized and censorship-resistant network in the years to come.