Luke Dashjr Steps Down from Ocean to Focus on BIP-110 Fork Development

Ocean co-founder Luke Dashjr temporarily resigns as president and CTO to lead BIP-110 Bitcoin fork efforts, citing need for new PoW algorithms and replay protection.

Woofun AI reports that Luke Dashjr, co-founder and CTO of Ocean, has temporarily stepped down from his executive roles to concentrate on developing the BIP-110 fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Mechanic, Ocean's communications lead, also announced a temporary leave of absence, clarifying that neither departure constitutes a permanent resignation.

Following a split at block height 961632, chains adhering to BIP-110 produced only two blocks before halting due to inheriting Bitcoin's high difficulty and lacking sufficient SHA-256d hash rate. Developers of Bitcoin Knots are preparing a hard fork to reset Proof of Work, modify block headers, and implement replay protection. They plan to select a new PoW algorithm from options including BLAKE2b-256, SHA3x, BLAKE2s, Scrypt, BLAKE3x2, and Eaglesong, with the final choice determined by the next block generated after 14:00 UTC the following day.

Dashjr, Kyle, and Chris Guida will oversee block headers and PoW, replay protection, and RDTS adaptation, respectively. Since BIP-110 shares transaction history with Bitcoin, developers argue that changes such as transaction signatures are necessary to prevent Bitcoin transactions from being valid on alternative chains. The Bitcoin community has criticized the fork for producing only two blocks, arguing that custom node rules are insufficient to incentivize users, miners, exchanges, and enterprises to migrate.