Bitcoin mining pools backed a new standard designed to give miners more control over the blocks they help produce.
The Stratum V2 Working Group said in a May 7 blog post that ANTPOOL, Block, F2Pool, Foundry, MARA Foundation, SpiderPool and DMND joined its effort to advance an open Bitcoin mining standard.
The announcement brings several major mining operators into a push to change how miners and pools work together. Currently, Bitcoin miners participate in the pooled BTC▼$62,302.00 mining.
This means pools define which transactions will be included in a block, while Bitcoin miners supply computing power. Therefore, in essence, miners aren’t involved in this process.
Stratum V2 allows miners to participate actively in the development process by validating and proposing a block template instead of performing the work selected by pools. The goal, according to the blog post, is to “remove compatibility barriers and allow the ecosystem to focus on what matters most.”
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Bitcoin Mining Gets a Decentralization Test
But Stratum V2’s impact still depends on real-world implementation. Pools, mining companies and hardware software providers need to support the tools that let miners use those features in practice.
Bitcoin mining remains concentrated around a small group of large pools. Hashrate Index data shows Bitcoin network hashrate near 999 EH/s as of May 11, with Foundry at about 32% of pool share, AntPool at 16%, F2Pool and SpiderPool at about 10% each, and MARA Pool at about 5%.
Together, those five pools account for roughly 73% of tracked Bitcoin pool share.
- Founded by Bitcoin mining software company Braiins and Block-backed Bitcoin developer group Spiral in 2022, Stratum V2 is meant to reduce that dependence while improving the mining connection itself.
- The protocol adds encrypted traffic between miners and pools and uses a more efficient communication format than Stratum V1, the older mining protocol introduced in 2012.
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