The Stratum V2 Working Group announced today that ANTPOOL, Block Inc, F2Pool, Foundry, Spiderpool, MARA Foundation, and DMND have joined the group. This move is meant to speed up the adoption of the Stratum v2 protocol across the Bitcoin mining industry.
The working group was originally founded back in 2022 by Braiins and Spiral. Its main goal is to develop and maintain the Stratum v2 protocol as an open, vendor-neutral standard. The protocol itself is a significant upgrade over the original Stratum mining standard. It offers better efficiency, more privacy, stronger security, and new features that could help with mining decentralization overall.
Adding these seven new members is a pretty big deal. All of them are well-known players in mining. This should help ensure the protocol works smoothly across real, large-scale mining operations. It also suggests that more of the mining industry is agreeing that Stratum v2 is the way forward.
Some of the key features in Stratum v2 include better management for big groups of miners. It also has end-to-end encryption. Perhaps most interestingly, it lets individual miners create their own block templates if they work with pools that support this. That could be a step toward more decentralized mining.
What Members Are Saying
Andy Zhou, the CEO of ANTPOOL, said his company is proud to support wider adoption of Stratum V2. He believes aligning around an open standard helps the whole industry work together more effectively and drives improvements in efficiency, security, and decentralization.
Kenway Wang, CTO of Spiderpool, noted that decentralization is key to his company’s mission. He said Stratum V2 supports this by allowing miner-constructed templates, while also boosting efficiency, especially for miners in areas with limited bandwidth.
About the Working Group
The Stratum V2 Working Group is described as an open collaboration effort. Its focus is on developing the protocol, getting it adopted, and ensuring different implementations work together. The group keeps a public specification and acts as a way for developers and industry stakeholders to coordinate.
This news was first reported by Bitcoin Magazine.
