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All Bitcoin mining licensees in Oman are now obligated to route their hashrate through Omanhash.om, a state-mandated mining pool, starting from June 17, retrospectively.
One can't choose not to participate.
The project was built by the MTCIT in partnership with Frontier Technologies, a local firm, and Enegix Global, an operator with experience in Kazakhstan.
Launching at around 10 EH/s, it accounts for approximately 3% of the worldwide network or one-third of Oman's total expected national hashrate of 30 EH/s, according to Q2 2026 Hashrate Index estimates.
The media is presenting this as a significant achievement in infrastructure.
The more insightful perspective is regulatory: Oman has recently shown, for the second time globally after Kazakhstan, that a sovereign entity can transform pool selection, traditionally a market-driven choice made by individual miners seeking optimal fees, into a compliance obligation mandated by licensing.
The true narrative reveals insights into the future trajectory of mining sovereignty.
The Mechanics: This is Kazakhstan's Playbook, Redeployed
The emphasis is on Enegix Global.
Launched in October 2023, btcpool.kz was the first government-accredited mining pool in Kazakhstan directly linked to a governmental tax-reporting system.
The firm has built and continues to manage the pool. Executives at Enegix have made it plain that Omanhash is not a one-time export but rather the second sovereign mission for the company.
The company's chief business development officer, Olzhas Amirov, used the phrase "the model we've been developing since Kazakhstan" to describe the development.
According to Enegix's chief product officer, Yersaiyn Nurtoleuov, the company has set a target of 30 EH/s and is now aiming for a total pool hashrate of 25 EH/s across 21pool.io, btcpool.kz, and Omanhash.
Compared to Oman's hashrate, that detail is more important.
Two sovereign mining missions have relied on a single private contractor for crucial technical support, and that contractor is now looking to secure a third chance.
The "state-mandated pool" goes from being an interesting concept to a serious one if Enegix signs on another government customer; this would mean that there is now a single supplier that can oversee the compliance framework for a group of states that are mining-friendly and have plenty of resources.
Why Oman, and Why Now
Midway through 2025, the Italian operator Alps Blockchain developed this project to full capacity with a hydro-cooled plant and a 150 MW site that cost $370 million.
A number of factors came together to make the situation worse, including cheap natural gas, a tax system that favours free zones, and Muscat's plan to diversify its economy away from oil, known as Vision 2040.
The presence of mining has persisted throughout history.
The effort to evaluate that capacity's real performance has been taken up by Omanhash.
Consolidating all licensed hashrate under a single government-supervised pool provides MTCIT with immediate visibility into energy consumption, mining profits, and, importantly for a region aiming to establish credibility with institutional investors, the risk of money laundering associated with newly mined coins.
In Oman, while cryptocurrency has yet to be recognized as legal tender according to central bank guidance, the mining aspect has emerged as the most stringently regulated area within the nation's digital-asset framework, surpassing the regulations governing trading or custody.
That is a purposeful reversal: Oman is employing industrial mining, rather than exchanges, as its demonstration of state-level cryptocurrency regulation.
Gulf's Diverging Crypto Policy
Neither the United Arab Emirates nor Saudi Arabia has taken any action to combine domestic hashrate into a single required state pool, despite their reliance on blockchain and tokenization narratives - free zones, licensing regimes for VASPs, sovereign AI and computing goals.
Oman is taking a more restricted and directed approach; it is not competing on the basis of regulatory laxity, but rather on the basis of regulatory clarity.
Quite a compromise, in the eyes of a miner.
Miners in Texas or Alberta still have a lot of leeway to negotiate fee structures, payment conditions (FPPS vs. PPLNS), and counterparty diversity among pools.
This leeway is taken away by a required pool.
What it really acquires, though, is clear legal standing-an idea put out by Enegix's Amirov-which allows miners to "operate legally, avoid punitive taxation, and maintain transparent communication with regulators."
The value of that can exceed that of fee optimization when considering jurisdiction risk for institutional capital.
The Hashrate-Concentration Backdrop
Based on pool-level data, Foundry USA produces 27% to 34% of the blocks, with AntPool and Foundry together accounting for more than 50% of the world's block production.
The exact percentage varies by sample time. When you include F2Pool and ViaBTC, you have four pools that control about 70–75% of the network.
A group of seven major pools, including Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, MARA Pool, Block Inc., and DMND, redirected block-template construction away from pool operators and toward individual miners in May with the Stratum V2 protocol, addressing censorship risk in part.
Both its regulatory body and the wider network will learn a lot about Omanhash's dedication to transparency based on its decision to use the latest model or stick with the traditional operator-controlled version.
The amount of openness being discussed is drastically different, and the launch materials don't explain how block templates are built or how much control miners have over which transactions are processed using Omanhash.
The Economics Miners Are Walking Into
CoinShares has projected that as much as 20% of global miners are presently functioning at a loss due to current difficulty levels and energy expenses.
That context is what renders Oman's subsidized-gas, state-supported framework particularly appealing: participants within Omanhash benefit from affordable energy and a defined legal pathway exactly when profit margins in other regions are under pressure.
It also heightens the importance of execution.
A compulsory pool that mishandles liquidity reserves during a period of unfortunate events, in a market already operating on narrow margins, generates payout friction that miners in voluntary pools can easily circumvent.
Omani miners are unable to proceed.
What to Watch Next
The key indication of whether this is becoming an exportable governance product instead than a customized Gulf agreement will be sent by if Enegix secures a third sovereign customer.
Second, for the first true test of whether the "visibility" argument yields anything beyond internal compliance optics, we need to know if Oman releases any pool-level reports on energy use or AML red flags.
Finally, now that Oman and Kazakhstan have demonstrated the idea twice, the question becomes whether other gas-rich governments with mining interests, whether they are Gulf or not, would follow suit with their own mandates.
A year ago, sovereign mining pools were something of a rarity. They are beginning to resemble policies.
