Tether Partners with OCEAN to Boost Bitcoin Mining Decentralization

The move aligns with Tether’s $500 million mining investment and includes the deployment of OCEAN’s censorship-resistant DATUM protocol across its mining sites in Latin America. Meanwhile, Bybit and Avalon Labs introduced a Bitcoin yield product via the Bybit Earn platform, bridging CeFi and DeFi to offer returns on Bitcoin without selling it. Additionally, Michael Saylor’s firm Strategy bought another 3,459 BTC for $285.5 million. Tether Bets on OCEAN to Challenge Centralized Bitcoin Mining Tether, the $144 billion stablecoin issuer, announced plans to allocate both its current and future Bitcoin mining hashrate to OCEAN’s decentralized mining pool. The move is part of Tether’s mission to enhance the decentralization of the Bitcoin network and reduce reliance on dominant centralized mining pools like Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC. According to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, this initiative is aligned with the company’s mining investments and efforts to safeguard Bitcoin against centralizing forces. Although Bitcoin’s hashrate is geographically dispersed, the block-building process is still heavily centralized, with a handful of mining pools controlling a majority of block production. OCEAN was created by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr in 2023, and it aims to shift this dynamic through its open-source DATUM protocol, which allows miners to build their own block templates independently. This protocol not only boosts censorship resistance but also reduces dependency on centralized intermediaries. Tether’s partnership with OCEAN includes deploying DATUM software across all of its global mining operations, including facilities in Uruguay, Paraguay, and El Salvador. The company’s mining initiatives gained some traction after it pledged to invest $500 million into Bitcoin mining in late 2023. The deployment will allow Tether to generate unique block templates on-site and aggregate thousands of mining rig connections with low-latency performance, promoting operational and geographic diversity in the process. Despite its ambitious goals, OCEAN currently holds a modest share of the Bitcoin mining market, and produces between 0.2% to 1% of Bitcoin blocks. Data from mempool.space shows that OCEAN mined nine blocks in the past week, including a rare consecutive pair on April 14. OCEAN statistics (Source: Mempool.space ) In contrast, Foundry USA, AntPool, and ViaBTC collectively mined over 66% of all blocks during the same period. While OCEAN’s hashrate reached 18.3 exahashes per second over the past 24 hours, Foundry USA dwarfed that figure with more than 298 EH/s, sourced from major mining firms like Hut 8, Bitdeer, and Bitfarms. OCEAN is backed by some well known people in the industry like Block CEO Jack Dorsey, and it relocated its headquarters to El Salvador in May of 2024. Despite controversy in December 2023 when Dashjr criticized Bitcoin Ordinals users for clogging the network, he denied allegations that OCEAN censored related transactions. Overall, the new partnership with Tether could greatly strengthen OCEAN’s competitiveness and help along its decentralization goals in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Bybit and Avalon Bring Bitcoin Yield to the Masses Other companies are also innovating in the Bitcoin space. Bybit partnered with Avalon Labs to offer Bitcoin yield through its Bybit Earn platform, which is a big step in merging centralized and decentralized finance models. According to an announcement that was made by Avalon Labs on April 14, the CeDeFi protocol will now be integrated into Bybit’s yield-generating product, which will allow users to earn returns on their Bitcoin holdings by participating in Avalon’s fixed-rate institutional borrowing system. This system allows institutional borrowers to access USDT liquidity without selling their Bitcoin, offering them an 8% fixed borrowing cost. Avalon Labs revealed in March that it secured at least $2 billion in credit capacity , with the potential to scale even more depending on market demand. The protocol is positioning itself as a key player in transforming Bitcoin into a productive asset, without the complexities that are typically associated with yield farming in decentralized finance. Earlier this year, Avalon also indicated that it is interested in launching a Bitcoin-backed debt fund under the SEC’s Regulation A exemption to bridge traditional finance and crypto markets. The protocol operates as a hybrid of CeFi and DeFi, providing enhanced control and compliance benefits while still leveraging decentralized mechanisms. The integration with Bybit leverages FBTC, a Bitcoin-pegged token that was developed by DeFi protocol Mantle and Antalpha Prime, which is bridged to Ethereum and other blockchains. Avalon accepts FBTC as collateral and lends against it in USDt, which is then deployed into high-yield strategies managed by Ethena Labs. These strategies utilize Ethena’s USDe and staked USDe tokens, offering returns that Avalon claims are both stable and secure. Avalon functions as a bridge between Bybit users and Ethena Labs’ DeFi yield strategies, delivering yield while minimizing user-side complexity. The announcement describes this approach as a CeFi-to-DeFi bridge that enables users to benefit from decentralized opportunities with centralized ease. This partnership comes shortly after Ethena raised $100 million to expand its blockchain offerings and develop products for institutional finance, including iUSDe, which is a version of its synthetic dollar aimed at regulated entities. Strategy Keeps Accumulating While some companies are innovating with Bitcoin, others are collecting it. Michael Saylor’s digital asset firm, Strategy, once again expanded its Bitcoin holdings with the purchase of 3,459 BTC for $285.5 million, at an average price of $82,618 per coin. The acquisition was revealed in an April 14 X post by Saylor, and brings the firm’s total Bitcoin stash to 531,644 BTC that was acquired at a cumulative cost of $35.92 billion. This positions Strategy with an average purchase price of $67,556 per coin and an unrealized gain of more than $9.1 billion. This represents an almost 25% return on its Bitcoin investment. This latest buy was Strategy’s first Bitcoin acquisition since March 31, when it purchased $1.9 billion worth of BTC. The move proves the firm’s enduring confidence in Bitcoin, even as global markets face serious pressure from evolving trade policies. The recent market pullback that was triggered largely by renewed tariff tensions under US President Donald Trump, has done little to deter Strategy’s bullish stance. On April 9, Trump temporarily paused the implementation of higher reciprocal tariffs, and returned rates to a 10% baseline for most countries except China, which still faces a steep 145% import tariff. BTC’s price action over the past week (Source: CoinMarketCap ) Despite macroeconomic turbulence, Bitcoin rebounded more than 6% in the past week, and was trading above $85,000 at press time. According to Stella Zlatareva from Nexo, the crypto market opened the week with “cautious strength,” showing a strong recovery from the previous tariff-induced sell-off. She noticed that investors are still focused on US-China trade developments, upcoming economic data from China, Federal Reserve commentary, and retail sales figures, all of which could influence near-term market direction. Some analysts still have bullish long-term outlooks for Bitcoin. Jamie Coutts projected that the increasing money supply could drive Bitcoin’s price to over $132,000 by the end of 2025. Joe Burnett of Unchained predicted that Bitcoin could reach $1.8 million by 2035.