This week, seven of the biggest Bitcoin mining corporations formally joined the Stratum V2 working group, marking the business’s clearest transition but to miner-controlled transaction choice.
Necessary factors:
- Antpool, F2pool, Foundry, and 4 others joined the Stratum V2 working group on Might 7, 2026.
- Stratum V2 provides miners as much as 7.4% greater profitability by means of lowered latency and improved charge seize.
- Brains and Spiral will set up a working group in 2022 and enter a brand new implementation part 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 presently collaborating in efforts to advance open mining protocol requirements. This announcement was printed 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 business default, it was by no means designed as an official normal. 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 permits miners to construct their very own block templates as a substitute of accepting pool allocations.
In accordance with the official announcement, “By retaining Stratum V2 as a vendor-neutral public specification, we take away compatibility obstacles and permit the ecosystem to give attention to what issues most: rising 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 assist the widespread adoption of Stratum V2,” including that aligning round open and interoperable requirements will allow the business 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 unbiased open supply group for greater than 4 years and is now getting into “a brand new part of accelerated improvement 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 necessary as a result of round 5 swimming pools presently management about 70% of the world's hashing energy and due to this fact 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 connect with V2 swimming pools with out requiring any {hardware} or firmware upgrades.
