The Bitcoin Beacon
OmanHash is now the sole, mandatory pool for every licensed miner in the sultanate — the state wants to see every coin its miners mint.
Oman built one of the Gulf's largest bitcoin mining industries. Now it has built the pipe every miner must flow through. OmanHash, launched by the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology with local Web3 firm Frontier Technologies, is the sultanate's official national mining pool — and under the approved framework, joining it is not optional for licensed operators.
The pool expects to consolidate roughly 10 EH/s in its first phase. The country behind it controls about 30 EH/s — close to 3% of the entire Bitcoin network, per Hashrate Index's Q2 data — grown from a $370 million hydro-cooled facility in Salalah in 2022 into more than $700 million of mining and data-center investment, including Italian firm Alps Blockchain's 150 MW site.
The platform was built by Enegix Global, the company that runs btcpool.kz in Kazakhstan, where a 2023 law pushed licensed miners into government-accredited pools that report revenue straight to the tax system. Oman is the second country to adopt the model. “This is our second sovereign mandate, and it validates the model we have been building since Kazakhstan,” said Enegix's Olzhas Amirov. The firm now runs about 25 EH/s across three pools and is targeting 30.
Not a ban — a ledger.
The design gives the government direct visibility into mining revenue, energy draw and the flow of newly minted coins. Oman is not restricting the industry it spent four years attracting; it is making that industry legible — and taxable.
Bitcoiners will read the fine print differently. Pools decide which transactions make it into the blocks they build, so every exahash routed through a state pool is hashrate a government could, in principle, direct — the criticism long aimed at large private pools like Foundry and AntPool, now with a flag attached. Two countries running sovereign pools is a footnote; ten would be a trend worth worrying about.
Korean treasury company Bitplanet, which switched on machines at Omani colocation sites this month, is an early test of how foreign capital fares inside the framework.
States that once asked whether to allow mining now ask how to watch it. Oman's answer — one mandatory pool — is the friendliest form of control, and still control.
Editor’s note: OmanHash launched June 17; it is new to the Beacon and runs today alongside fresh Q2 hashrate data and Bitplanet’s arrival. Initial-phase hashrate figures come from the operator’s own projections.
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