Simple Mining declined to signal support for BIP-110 even though it mines through Ocean, a Bitcoin pool that had been signaling for the proposal by default.

The mining company relied on Ocean’s DATUM protocol, which allows individual miners to decide how their blocks are built instead of automatically following the pool’s preferred configuration.

Simple Mining said it mined block 961,634 on Bitcoin’s main chain Sunday, just two blocks after supporters of BIP-110 created their own chain.

The company said it deliberately omitted the BIP-110 signal. It argued that hashrate provides a reliable indication of miner sentiment, noting that support for the proposal had reached only about 2.6%, compared with the 55% threshold required.

Ocean’s role makes the decision particularly notable. The pool switched to default BIP-110 signaling in July and accounted for nearly all of the proposal’s limited mining support before the chain split.

BIP-110, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110, calls for a temporary restriction on storing non-financial information, such as text and images, in Bitcoin transactions.

Simple Mining was able to reject the proposal because DATUM gives miners greater control over block construction. The protocol lets an operator use its own Bitcoin software to create blocks while still directing its computing power through Ocean and participating in the pool’s reward system.

Under the usual mining-pool model, a pool combines the computing resources of multiple miners and generally determines which transactions are included in blocks and what signaling software they use.

DATUM gives individual miners more authority over those decisions.

Using that flexibility, Simple Mining mined block 961,634 without signaling for BIP-110 and said the main Bitcoin chain continued through its block.

The episode helps explain why Ocean-linked miners appeared on opposite sides of the weekend’s split. Mempool reported that a miner operating through Ocean produced the first block accepted by the BIP-110 branch on Saturday. Simple Mining later used Ocean’s infrastructure but rejected the proposal, producing a block that remained on the main chain.

BIP-110 nodes began rejecting blocks without the proposal’s signal at block 961,632. By then, support had peaked at approximately 2.6%, dramatically below the required 55%.

The BIP-110 branch produced blocks 961,632 and 961,633 before halting. The main network continued adding blocks roughly every 10 minutes.

By Monday, the main Bitcoin chain had reached block 961,725, putting the BIP-110 branch more than 200 blocks behind.

The split highlights the difference between a mining pool’s default settings and the decisions individual miners can make when using infrastructure such as Ocean’s DATUM protocol.