Luke Dashjr exits Ocean pool to launch hard fork

Luke Dashjr has officially parted ways with Ocean mining pool to launch an alternate chain.

Ocean repurchased Dashjr’s co-founder equity following months of escalating conflict over transaction filtering and protocol upgrades. The rift culminated after Dashjr failed to rally support for BIP 110, leading to a hard fork and his quick pivot to a new network called Convoy alongside developer Mechanic. Bob Burnett took over as Ocean chairman, while primary backer Jack Dorsey remains aligned with the core pool.

The hard-forked network relies on a modified Blake2b hashing algorithm rather than Bitcoin’s original SHA-256 consensus rules. With difficulty resets driving block production down to one block per minute, Dashjr sought full control over his mining architecture. Yet market reaction was swift and unforgiving. Niche exchanges briefly listed the alternative token between $83 and $383, reflecting virtually no broader economic backing.

On Stacker News Live, hosts Keon and Carvin highlighted how fast the separation materialized once consensus fractured. Keon noted on the show that Bitcoin developers who fork away almost never create viable monetary alternatives, even if some eventually return to the main chain. For Ocean, the equity buyback stabilizes operations while stripping out governance gridlock.

The friction around Bitcoin privacy extended beyond mining protocol updates on September 6, 2026.

Swedish financial regulators forced peer-to-peer exchange Peach Bitcoin to dismantle its non-custodial, KYC-free escrow model. Back in 2022, Swedish authorities ruled that participating in multi-signature escrow without taking direct custody did not require full customer verification. That regulatory tolerance has ended under tightening European surveillance rules, forcing Peach to demand identity checks for user dispute resolution.

Keon pointed out on Stacker News Live that stripping non-custodial platforms of arbitration mechanics creates a perverse dilemma. Users must either absorb unchecked scam risk or submit their private identities to centralized databases. The squeeze on hybrid peer-to-peer services illustrates how regulatory pressure will ultimately drive traders away from semi-custodial compromises and toward pure protocol-level tools that operate without corporate chokepoints.

The split leaves core Bitcoin development intact while peripheral forks continue to fail the market test.