Congratulations to our early miners! Our first block today was a huge reward and we’re happy for and grateful to the miners who have supported us. Everyone will be receiving about 5.48x what they would have received from FPPS pools.

A minor misconfiguration leftover from our pre-launch testing led to a block which did not directly reward our miners as intended. We have since paid out the miners manually.

The block template was created using the old v23 Bitcoin Knots rather than the latest version which is still completing testing (but should be ready soon). This unfortunately resulted in a large amount of spam being mined rather than real transactions. While this is only marginally better than other pools, we strive to hold ourselves to a higher standard and only do things that are good for Bitcoin. It is also vital to ensure we never mine invalid blocks, however, so we must fully validate the new version before upgrading to it. We had hoped to complete this before our first block, but for better or worse, we were "lucky" and found it much sooner than expected. Testing and safe deployment of the upgrade will proceed as soon as possible, without endangering Bitcoin or miner work.

We will continue to share updates as part of OCEAN’s commitment to transparency and our promise to be better for Bitcoin.