The long-awaited biggest deployment move in Bitcoin mining took place quietly last week. The industry’s 7 major pools – Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, MARA Pool, Block Inc and DMND – have come together to support a common open standard, the Stratum V2 protocol. The collaboration was officially announced by the Stratum V2 working group.
Decision making power in mining passes to miners
Stratum V2 is an open source protocol that manages communication between mining pools and individual miners within the pool. The most important innovation brought by this standard is that miners can now create their own block templates. In other words, the miner can directly decide which transactions will be included in each new block, and this authority is taken from the pool operators.
In the currently used Stratum V1 protocol, transaction selection for almost every new block was in the hands of pool administrators. This situation constituted one of the most discussed structural problems regarding the centralization of mining in the last two years.
Thanks to Stratum V2, the miner will now determine which transactions will be included in the blocks. This feature has long stood out as one of the most important issues within the Bitcoin community for those who want mining to progress in a distributed and transparent manner.
Great unification in hashrate power
According to Hashrate Index data, Foundry accounts for 34.2 percent of the global Bitcoin hashrate, AntPool for 14.2 percent, F2Pool for 11.3 percent, and SpiderPool for 10.5 percent. Additionally, MARA Pool is included in the group with a 4.7% share. All seven pools lead the transition to Stratum V2, collectively representing approximately 75 percent of the computing power of the Bitcoin network.
This high rate means a critical threshold for the implementation of Stratum V2. Although the protocol has been available since 2022, it was only used by a limited number of repositories until now. The working group, whose founding members include Braiins and Spiral, defines the step now taken as the beginning of an accelerated proliferation process.
Mining economy is struggling
In addition to all these technical developments, it is stated that the economic pressure in the mining sector is also increasing. According to calculations made by CoinShares, nearly 20 percent of currently operating miners cannot achieve profitability. Hashprice, that is, a miner’s daily earnings per production power, is currently at $ 38.57, and this figure is expressed as the break-even point for operators using mid-level hardware.
The network difficulty level will be updated on May 15 and will increase from 132.47T to 135.64T. The total computing power of the Bitcoin network is currently recorded as 998 exahash/second.
The overall picture indicates that the widespread use of Stratum V2 could initiate a significant change in the mining market, with both transparency and the possibility of participants directing their own blocks. Although the pools in question viewed the protocol as a ‘side project’ until recently, it is expected that Stratum V2 will become the general standard in a short time with the support of such major players.
