Stablecoin Giant Tether Throws Weight Behind Bitcoin Mining Pool Ocean

Stablecoin giant Tether has said it will direct resources to help the Bitcoin mining pool Ocean, pledging to "deploy both existing and future hashrate" to the pool.

The El Salvador-based company said Monday that it would do so to "support the resilience, transparency, and decentralization of Bitcoin's foundational infrastructure."

Hashrate is the computational power used by the Bitcoin network. The more hashrate a Bitcoin mining pool has, the more efficiently it can find blocks and reap the immense rewards of newly mined Bitcoin and transaction fees.

By Tether deploying hashrate on Ocean, it is giving resources—in the form of processing power—to the pool. 

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said: "Deploying hashrate to Ocean aligns with both our mining investments and our broader mission to fortify Bitcoin against centralizing forces."

The company did not immediately respond to Decrypt's questions. 

Ocean is a Bitcoin mining pool led by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr and backed by Block boss and X (formerly Twitter) co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The pool previously blocked non-financial Bitcoin transactions that Dashjr called "spam," such as those containing Ordinals inscriptions—aka NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain. Ocean ultimately relented in December 2023 and said that pool participants could choose whether or not to block such transactions.

Bitcoin's blockchain requires miners to race to solve complex puzzles; the quickest miners process blocks—filled with transaction data—and are rewarded with newly minted digital coins for doing so. Miners process new blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain around every 10 minutes.

Tether—which mints USDT, the third-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap—is delving deeper into Bitcoin: It is buying more digital coins, and in January announced that its stablecoin would soon be available via Bitcoin and its layer-2 network, Lightning. 

USDT is a digital asset used by crypto traders to enter and exit trades. It is backed, according to Tether, by dollar reserves, and is available on a number of top crypto networks. 

Edited by Andrew Hayward