Odaily News, according to Bitcoin News monitoring, OCEAN operator Mummolin Inc. and co-founder Luke Dashjr issued a joint statement on August 29, agreeing to part ways. Luke Dashjr resigned as OCEAN Chairman, Chief Technology Officer, and Director, and Mummolin bought back all of his equity. Neither party disclosed the transaction amount nor Luke Dashjr's previous shareholding ratio. Both parties stated that the split stemmed from differing visions regarding the future direction of Bitcoin mining.
The BIP-110 dispute subsequently escalated into a split of the Bitcoin chain. BIP-110, also known as the "Data Carve-out Temp Soft Fork," aims to restrict the use of Bitcoin transactions to store non-financial data, including content related to Ordinals. Before the activation period began, only 51 out of 2,016 blocks supported the proposal, accounting for 2.53%, falling below the 55% threshold required for activation.
On August 8, nodes enforcing BIP-110 split from the Bitcoin main chain by rejecting blocks that did not support the proposal. On that day, the minority chain only produced 2 blocks before halting; since then, the chain mined 6 more blocks, bringing the total to 8 blocks. The initial alternative chain blocks were mined by the Roughnecks mining organization using OCEAN infrastructure.
On August 10, other Bitcoin developers removed Luke Dashjr from the editor list of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository, citing his involvement in BIP-110 and its editorial process. Luke Dashjr disputed this and stated that day that he would temporarily leave OCEAN to focus on Bitcoin and open-source development.
Luke Dashjr is currently advancing a new project called CONVOY, using the X account @CONVOY_Mining. This project will continue his push for the decentralization of Bitcoin mining, though its specific structure and launch arrangements have not yet been announced. The X account was created in August 2026 and currently has 0 posts and fewer than 500 followers.
OCEAN was founded by Mummolin and co-founded by Luke Dashjr in 2023, and previously secured a $6.2 million seed round led by Jack Dorsey. OCEAN operates under a non-custodial model, with mining rewards paid directly to miners rather than being held and distributed by the pool. OCEAN also developed the DATUM protocol, designed to give individual miners greater control over the transactions included in blocks they participate in mining. OCEAN stated that it will continue operating its transparent non-custodial mining pool and the DATUM protocol after Luke Dashjr's departure. According to Mempool.space data, OCEAN is still mining on the Bitcoin main chain.
The change proposed by Luke Dashjr altered the proof-of-work algorithm of the alternative chain to Blake2b, which went live on the new chain at approximately 3:00 AM EST on August 30, making it a hard fork of the Bitcoin main chain. The new chain continued from block 961,639, which was mined before the chain stalled, and reduced mining difficulty from 125 trillion to 30 million, a decrease of 99.99%. The new chain produces a block approximately every 4 minutes on average.
Despite the need to replace mining hardware, which is not directly compatible with the SHA-256 algorithm, the new chain quickly attracted over 170 EH/s of hashrate. As of the time of reporting, the Bitcoin main chain hashrate stood at 908 EH/s, while the new chain's hashrate was 177 EH/s. The Bitcoin main chain's hashrate is approximately 5 times that of the new chain. Coins mined on the new chain also require 100 confirmations before transfer, after which their value will be determined by the market.
