OCEAN's DATUM is good, but not perfect

It seems that the key difference between DATUM and Stratum V2 is that, with DATUM, the miners have to broadcast their blocks themselves — the pool cannot do it for them, as is the case with Sv2. Reason being, miners only share the merkle branch of their transactions with the mining pool, not the transactions themselves. That said, Filippo Merli, CTO of DEMAND Pool, told Blockspace that “you can do the same thing with Sv2,” since “a pool can just accept any proposed template without requiring additional transaction data.”

Ocean also claims that all rewards paid out from a DATUM block will be paid directly to miners from the coinbase transaction of the block (although traditionally, the number of payouts a miner can make directly from the the coinbase transaction is limited to roughly 100 due to ASIC firmware limitations).

DATUM Limitations

Like Stratum V2, any mining pool could run DATUM and use it to disintermediate the block template construction process.

But the larger pools of the world are unlikely to do so, argues Nick Hansen, the CEO of Luxor, which runs its mining pool. That’s because the larger the pool, the more likely they will need to play by the rules of regulators and officials, and that includes censoring transactions that might run afoul with sanctions and other laws.

“Big pools most likely won’t adopt this protocol because they need that for, let’s just say, for whatever reason. I run a pool in North Korea, and they say, don’t process any transactions for Americans…You just have to be able to not accept a particular transaction,” he told Blockspace.

Speaking to the potential limitations of other pools adopting DATUM, a developer at another bitcoin mining pool, who asked to remain anonymous, told Blockspace that he was “confused why [OCEAN] would want to add a narrowly-scoped application specific to their pool versus leverage a universal protocol (Stratum V2) with the same/similar feature baked in.”

“Miners, at least our customers and others I know, do not want to add further complexity to their tech stack without very clear economic payback. While Ocean miners are likely more ideological, they are still businesses…It appears to require some networking knowledge and at least a bitcoin node and a gateway set up, which I think could include at least the same amount of friction as Sv2 plus job declaration,” the developer said.

Some of those benefits, they continued, include end-to-end encryption and binary transfer (OCEAN uses JSON).

All of that said, the developer means “no disrespect to OCEAN,” adding that they are happy to see the team “actually taking action and trying things” and “hope they see adoption on DATUM.”

Edit October 16, 2024 (11:40am EST): The original version of this article inaccurately stated that Sv2 is developed only by Braiins, whereas it is actually co-developed by the company and a number of other parties; it also inaccurately described the block template and negotiation process with Sv2. Both points have been amended. Additionally, the original article erroneously claimed that mining pools using DATUM cannot reject a miner’s block template, but this is not the case. We made a number of other edits for clarity and accuracy as well.