Overview
- Seven of the largest pools — Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, MARA Pool, Block Inc., and DMND — have joined the Stratum V2 working group, together representing close to 75% of global hashrate.
- Stratum V2 is an open protocol for pool‑miner communication that lets individual miners build their own block templates, so miners — not pool operators — choose which transactions go into new blocks.
- The protocol introduces end‑to‑end encryption and more efficient fleet management, and the project says lower latency and better data handling could lift miner profitability by up to 7.4%.
- Miners are under strain, with CoinShares estimating 15–20% of operations are unprofitable and reports pointing to another increase in Bitcoin mining difficulty in May.
- The move does not change how hashrate is concentrated across big pools, but it shifts transaction selection away from pool operators, addressing long‑standing concerns about centralized control.