This week, seven of the biggest Bitcoin mining corporations formally joined the Stratum V2 working group, marking the trade’s clearest transition but to miner-controlled transaction choice.
Necessary factors:
- Antpool, F2pool, Foundry, and 4 others joined the Stratum V2 working group on Could 7, 2026.
- Stratum V2 presents miners as much as 7.4% greater profitability by way of diminished latency and improved price seize.
- Brains and Spiral will set up a working group in 2022 and enter a brand new implementation section in 2026.
7 Bitcoin Mining Swimming pools Return to Stratum V2 as Miners Push Block Template Management
Antpool, F2pool, Foundry, Spiderpool, Block Inc., MARA Basis, and DMND are at the moment collaborating in efforts to advance open mining protocol requirements. This announcement was revealed by Pavlenex on the official web site of the Stratum V2 Working Group.
Stratum V2 replaces Stratum V1, a push-based protocol launched by Marek “Slush” Palatinus in 2012. Though Stratum V1 turned the trade default, it was by no means designed as an official customary. V1 gave swimming pools full management over transaction choice, executed in cleartext, and uncovered miners to hashrate hijacking and surveillance.
The brand new protocol addresses these points. It makes use of end-to-end authenticated encryption, reduces bandwidth utilization by about 60% on the pool aspect and 70% on the miners, and introduces a job declaration subprotocol that enables miners to construct their very own block templates as an alternative of accepting pool allocations.
In accordance with the official announcement, “By maintaining Stratum V2 as a vendor-neutral public specification, we take away compatibility boundaries and permit the ecosystem to deal with what issues most: growing effectivity, privateness, safety, and miner autonomy, which finally results in elevated profitability.”
Actual-world testing by Brains reveals that miners can earn as much as 7.4% greater profitability when operating V2 natively as a result of quicker template supply, decrease latency, and improved pricing choices.
Antpool CEO Andy Zhou stated the corporate is “proud to help the widespread adoption of Stratum V2,” including that aligning round open and interoperable requirements will allow the trade to collaborate on effectivity, safety, and decentralization. Spiderpool CTO Kenway Wang stated the protocol helps miner-built templates, making it particularly helpful for operators in bandwidth-constrained environments.
Brains Pool and DMND are already operating Stratum V2 in manufacturing. DMND was launched in 2025 as one of many first swimming pools to offer full templates for miners to select from. Blitzpool is doing this for solo miners, and the Stratum V2 reference implementation group pool continues testing.
The working group was established in 2022 by Brains and Spiral, Block’s Bitcoin expertise arm. The group has been working as an impartial open supply group for greater than 4 years and is now coming into “a brand new section of accelerated growth and deployment” with the addition of bigger operators.
Foundry, Luxor, and Antpool every had pre-testing commitments or infrastructure in place previous to this announcement. The seven new additions equate to tens of exahashes per second in complete hashrate. This quantity is vital as a result of round 5 swimming pools at the moment management about 70% of the world’s hashing energy and subsequently most block content material.
For particular person Bitcoin miners, the precise transition will rely upon when these swimming pools allow V2 entry to their customers. Translation proxies decrease the barrier to adoption by permitting Stratum V1 firmware to hook up with V2 swimming pools with out requiring any {hardware} or firmware upgrades.
