Bitcoin Mining Pool Giants Foundry, Antpool and F2pool Signal Stratum V2 Shift

Key Takeaways

7 Bitcoin Mining Swimming pools Again Stratum V2 as Miners Push for Block Template Management

Antpool, F2pool, Foundry, Spiderpool, Block Inc., MARA Basis, and DMND are actually a part of the trouble to advance the open mining protocol commonplace. The announcement was revealed by Pavlenex on the Stratum V2 Working Group’s official web site.

Stratum V2 replaces Stratum V1, a push-based protocol launched in 2012 by Marek “Slush” Palatinus that grew to become the trade default however was by no means designed as a proper commonplace. V1 left swimming pools in full management of transaction choice, ran in plaintext, and uncovered miners to hashrate hijacking and surveillance.

The newer protocol addresses these issues. It makes use of end-to-end authenticated encryption, cuts bandwidth use by roughly 60% on the pool facet and 70% for miners, and introduces a Job Declaration sub-protocol that lets miners construct their very own block templates as a substitute of accepting what swimming pools assign.

In keeping with the official announcement, “By sustaining Stratum V2 as a public, vendor-neutral specification, we take away compatibility boundaries and permit the ecosystem to deal with what issues most: bettering effectivity, privateness, safety, and miner autonomy, in the end resulting in elevated profitability.”

Actual-world checks from Braiins present miners can seize as much as 7.4% greater profitability by way of quicker template supply, decrease latency, and improved price choice when operating V2 natively.

Antpool CEO Andy Zhou stated the corporate is “proud to assist the broader adoption of Stratum V2,” including that aligning round an open, interoperable commonplace lets the trade collaborate on effectivity, safety, and decentralization. Spiderpool CTO Kenway Wang famous the protocol helps miner-constructed templates, that are particularly helpful for operators in bandwidth-constrained environments.

Braiins Pool and DMND are already operating Stratum V2 in manufacturing. DMND launched in 2025 as one of many first swimming pools to supply full miner-selected templates. Blitzpool runs it for solo miners, and the Stratum V2 Reference Implementation neighborhood pool continues testing.

The Working Group was based in 2022 by Braiins and Spiral, Block’s Bitcoin expertise arm. The group has operated for greater than 4 years as an impartial open-source neighborhood and is now getting into “a brand new part of accelerated growth and deployment” with the addition of large-scale operators.

Foundry, Luxor, and Antpool had every made prior testing commitments or ready infrastructure earlier than this announcement. The seven new additions symbolize tens of exahashes per second of mixed hashrate, a determine that issues as a result of roughly 5 swimming pools at present management about 70% of world hashpower and subsequently most block content material.

For particular person bitcoin miners, the sensible shift relies on when these swimming pools allow V2 entry for customers. Translation proxies already enable Stratum V1 firmware to hook up with V2 swimming pools with out requiring {hardware} or firmware upgrades, which reduces the barrier to adoption.