Tether (USDT) is Moving its Global Bitcoin Mining Power to Ocean

In an April 15 statement, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the deployment supports the company's goal of "fortifying Bitcoin" against "centralizing forces":

Tether (USDT) is deploying its global Bitcoin (BTC) mining power to Ocean, a decentralized mining pool launched by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr.

Announcing the move on April 15, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the deployment supports the company’s goal of “fortifying Bitcoin.”

“We are pleased to announce that we will be deploying our global Bitcoin mining fleet to support Luke Dashjr's Ocean pool in this crucial endeavor,” said Ardoino.

“This deployment aligns perfectly with Tether’s broader goal of fortifying Bitcoin and its decentralized ethos against centralizing forces.”

Essentially, Tether is trying to siphon some of the control away from big mining pools like Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC, so they can get a bigger piece of the pie.

Recently, Tether ramped up its mining footprint with a massive $500M (AU$787M) investment in new infrastructure.

The company’s mining operations are now all over the world, including Latin America, having recently set up a corporate base in El Salvador.

How It Will Work

Ocean is on a mission to decentralize Bitcoin block production by allowing miners to create their own block templates via its open-source Datum protocol.

Tether will be using this protocol across its entire mining fleet, which operates in rural areas of Africa, Uruguay, Paraguay, and El Salvador.

The Datum protocol enables local generation of block templates and supports thousands of low-latency mining connections, which helps boost global competitiveness while "promoting geographic and operational diversity," according to Tether.

Ocean was launched in 2023 with the backing of Block (NYSE:SQ) CEO Jack Dorsey. The project also moved its headquarters to El Salvador in May.

So far, Ocean controls a small fraction of the network’s block production. According to data from mempool.space, the pool accounts for just 0.2% to 1% of mined Bitcoin blocks.

In the past week, for instance, Ocean mined nine blocks, two of them back-to-back, while Foundry USA alone mined 331.

However, Tether’s support could help close that gap. As of press time, Ocean’s hashrate over the past 24 hours stood at 18.3 EH/s, compared to Foundry’s 298 EH/s.

To put that into perspective, major publicly listed miners like Hut 8 (TSX: HUT8)(NASDAQ: HUT) and Bitdeer (NYSE: BITD) contribute around 10.6 and 23.8 EH/s, respectively. Bitfarms (NASDAQ: BITF) is currently operating at 11.5 EH/s.