Overview
- Seven large pools — Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, MARA Pool, Block Inc., and DMND — joined the Stratum V2 working group, giving the effort near three-quarters of global hashrate.
- Stratum V2 is a miner–pool communication standard that adds end-to-end encryption and a job negotiation feature so individual miners can build their own block templates.
- The change targets a long-running centralization concern by moving transaction selection from pool operators to miners, though it does not alter how hashrate itself is concentrated across pools.
- Mining economics remain tight as CoinShares estimates 15% to 20% of miners are unprofitable and network difficulty is set to rise on May 15, which increases interest in any efficiency gains.
- The project claims the upgrade could lift miner profitability by up to 7.4% and Block’s hardware arm could embed support at the chip level, but real impact depends on implementation and miner uptake.