OCEAN co-founder Luke Dashjr has left the Bitcoin mining pool after a three-week period of turmoil around one of the more divisive Bitcoin protocol disputes in recent years.

In a joint statement released August 29, OCEAN operator Mummolin Inc. and Dashjr said they had agreed to separate.

Dashjr resigned as OCEAN’s chairman, chief technology officer and director, while Mummolin repurchased all of his equity. Neither side disclosed the value of the transaction or Dashjr’s previous ownership stake.

The companies said the split reflects “different visions for the future of Bitcoin mining” following recent protocol developments. They did not identify a specific proposal as the reason for the separation.

The timing, however, places the announcement in the aftermath of the BIP-110 experiment, a dispute that put Dashjr at the center of a broader fight over Bitcoin’s rules and the role of miners.

BIP-110, also known as the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, sought to restrict the use of Bitcoin transactions for storing non-financial data, including material associated with Ordinals.

Support for the proposal remained limited. Before its enforcement period began, only 51 of 2,016 blocks had signaled support, or 2.53%, far below the 55% threshold associated with activation.

On August 8, nodes enforcing BIP-110 split from the main Bitcoin chain after rejecting blocks that did not signal for the proposal. The minority chain produced only two blocks during that day before stalling, while the main network continued operating normally.

The first blocks on the alternative chain were mined through OCEAN’s infrastructure by the Roughnecks mining group.

Since then, the alternate chain managed to mine 6 more blocks, bringing its total mined blocks to 8, which is still a long way behind the main chain.

The episode was followed by another setback for Dashjr. On August 10, other Bitcoin developers removed him as an editor of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository, citing concerns over his involvement in BIP-110 and the editorial process.

Dashjr disputed the decision and, that same day, said he was taking a sabbatical from OCEAN to focus on Bitcoin and open-source development.

Dashjr will now pursue a new project called CONVOY, using the account @CONVOY_Mining on X. The project is expected to continue his long-running focus on decentralizing Bitcoin mining, although details about its structure and launch have not yet been announced.

The X page was created in August 2026, currently has 0 posts, and fewer than 500 followers.

The departure marks a major change for OCEAN, which was launched by Mummolin and co-founded by Dashjr in 2023, with $6.2 million in seed funding led by Jack Dorsey. The main idea around the mining pool was that it should give miners more control over the work they perform.

Unlike traditional pools, OCEAN promotes a non-custodial model. Mining rewards are paid directly to miners rather than being held by the pool before distribution. The pool has also developed DATUM, a protocol designed to give individual miners more control over the transactions included in the blocks they help mine.

OCEAN says that the mission will continue without Dashjr. The company plans to maintain its transparent, non-custodial mining pool, including its effort to give miners greater control over block construction through its DATUM protocol. According to data from Mempool.space, OCEAN has continued mining blocks on the main chain.

In the meantime, Dashjr has been busy with his project. On Friday, he announced that his proposed change to Bitcoin’s hashing algorithm would be implemented on the new chain on Sunday.

The proposal changes the new chain’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm to Blake2b, effectively creating a hard fork of Bitcoin’s mainnet. According to reports, the new PoW algorithm was successfully implemented, and the chain went live at around 3 AM ET on August 30.

This makes the new chain the latest hard fork of Bitcoin’s main chain.

The long-running divide between supporters of Ordinals and its opponents has now officially culminated in a hard fork and chain split, with supporters of each chain claiming that theirs is what Bitcoin is meant to be.

The protocol-level change makes it significantly harder for miners to support the new chain. Because the hashing algorithm has changed, miners on the legacy chain cannot simply switch over to the new one. Existing Bitcoin mining hardware is designed to compute SHA-256, while the new chain uses a different algorithm.

To begin mining on the new chain, miners would therefore need to replace their existing ASICs with entirely different hardware; a move that could cost them a significant amount of money.

Despite that, the new chain has managed to muster more than 170 Eh/s of hashing power in a short time, which is noteworthy.

According to data from Mempool.space and Mempool.guide, the legacy Bitcoin chain had 908 EH/s of hashing power behind it at the time of writing, compared with 177 EH/s for the new chain.

The new chain picked up from the last block mined before the stall, block 961,639. As part of the hard fork, the chain’s hashing algorithm was changed and its mining difficulty was reduced from 125 trillion to 30 million; a 99.99% decrease.

The dramatic reduction in difficulty has allowed the new chain to mine blocks much more rapidly, with a new block being produced roughly every four minutes on average.

For now, the legacy chain has roughly five times more hashing power behind it, as well as a significantly higher difficulty level.

Higher hashrate and difficulty are not merely abstract metrics; they have practical implications for a decentralized blockchain’s security. A higher difficulty level generally makes it more costly for an attacker to acquire enough hashing power to manipulate the chain, as doing so requires more mining hardware and energy.

Conversely, a chain with lower hashrate and difficulty may be more susceptible to certain attacks, particularly those that rely on an attacker controlling a significant share of the network’s hashing power.

It remains to be seen how miners will be divided between the two chains and which one will ultimately attract more hashing power. Coins mined on the new chain will also need to reach 100 confirmations before they can be moved.

Once that happens, the market will determine how much those coins are worth.