Oman Orders Every Bitcoin Miner Into One State Pool

Oman spent the last three years courting bitcoin miners with cheap power and free-zone incentives. Now it wants them all in one place. The country’s Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology has launched OmanHash (omanhash.om), a national mining pool, and made it mandatory: every licensed miner operating in the sultanate is required to route its hashrate through the state platform rather than through the global pools most miners use by default.

The government says OmanHash will consolidate roughly 10 exahashes per second of computing power in its first phase. Oman already accounts for an estimated 3% of the global bitcoin network — on the order of 30 EH/s — with more than $700 million invested in mining around the Salalah Free Zone. Against a network now running near 913 EH/s, the mandated first phase is roughly one percent of all the hashpower on Earth, funnelled through a single Omani entity.

Who built it, and why

The pool was constructed by Enegix Global, the same contractor behind Kazakhstan’s government-accredited pool, btcpool.kz, which launched in October 2023. Day-to-day operation falls to Frontier Technologies LLC, an Omani firm. The design is familiar: a mining pool coordinates the work of many machines, assembles the block templates they hash on, and distributes the rewards. Mandate a single pool, and the state gains both a cut of the revenue and a clear view of exactly who is mining what.

For a government, the logic is straightforward. A national pool formalises an industry that has grown in the gray, ties mining revenue to the treasury, and gives regulators a single point of oversight over an activity that otherwise runs on anonymous connections to servers abroad. It also monetises the very thing Oman has in abundance — energy — on the state’s own terms.

The catch

The concern is not the revenue. It is the concentration. A mining pool that assembles block templates can, in principle, choose which transactions to include or exclude — a lever the network is designed to deny any single party. When routing through the state pool is voluntary, a miner unhappy with that control can point its machines elsewhere in seconds. When it is a licence condition, the only exit is to leave the country.

That is what separates OmanHash from an ordinary large pool. Bitcoin’s censorship-resistance rests on the fact that no one can compel hashrate; a national mandate is compulsion by design, over a bloc of it. Newer standards such as Stratum V2 let individual miners build their own block templates and blunt a pool’s power, but adoption is partial and a mandate can simply specify the terms.

Oman is only the second country to try this, after Kazakhstan. If more energy-rich states copy the template, a growing share of global hashrate could sit inside a handful of government-run pools — each small on its own, and consequential together.

Why it matters: states used to threaten bitcoin miners. Increasingly they license them — and a licence can come with a demand to route through the government’s own machine.

Hashrate figures (10 EH/s first phase; Oman’s ~3% of the network) are as reported and are estimates that vary by source. OmanHash launched via Oman’s MTCIT; operation is attributed to Frontier Technologies LLC and construction to Enegix Global per the cited reports.