The most interesting part of this statement is what it doesn't say. "Different visions for the future of Bitcoin mining following the recent protocol developments" is doing a lot of work — and the split itself is less surprising than the timing.

Ocean's differentiators were always Luke's thesis made concrete: non-custodial mining, publicly verifiable block templates, no transaction filtering, Stratum V2 support. Those are protocol-level commitments, not pool-level features. They carry real commercial costs: template publishing and payout engineering are harder, there's less optimization headroom, and the operator takes on permanent PR battles by taking public stands on contentious protocol topics.

When a founder whose identity is the product leaves and the company keeps the name, the usual playbook is repositioning toward the market majority: miners who mostly care about stable payouts, low fees and uptime. The statement's emphasis on "transparent, non-custodial" continuity suggests OCEAN wants to keep the brand values without the activist edge.

Things I'll actually watch with CONVOY:

1. Template/block transparency — if it's independently verifiable on day one, the thesis survived the split; if not, it was never the point.
2. Stratum V2 adoption rates — the real decentralization test is miners using it, not a pool merely supporting it.
3. Payout structure — non-custodial + full-pay-per-share was the genuinely hard engineering Ocean did. Whether CONVOY keeps that model tells you if this is the same bet or a new one.

The charitable read: Bitcoin is one of the few industries where a public schism produces two competing products instead of zero. The honest read: "decentralize mining" was never a finished feature — it's a direction, and two organizations pursuing it with different business models is probably healthier than one.