Seven of the largest names in bitcoin mining formally joined the Stratum V2 Working Group this week, signaling the clearest industry shift yet toward miner-controlled transaction selection.
Antpool, F2pool, Foundry, Spiderpool, Block Inc., MARA Foundation, and DMND are now part of the effort to advance the open mining protocol standard. The announcement was published by Pavlenex on the Stratum V2 Working Group’s official site.
Stratum V2 replaces Stratum V1, a push-based protocol released in 2012 by Marek “Slush” Palatinus that became the industry default but was never designed as a formal standard. V1 left pools in full control of transaction selection, ran in plaintext, and exposed miners to hashrate hijacking and surveillance.
The newer protocol addresses those problems. It uses end-to-end authenticated encryption, cuts bandwidth use by roughly 60% on the pool side and 70% for miners, and introduces a Job Declaration sub-protocol that lets miners build their own block templates instead of accepting what pools assign.
According to the official announcement, “By maintaining Stratum V2 as a public, vendor-neutral specification, we remove compatibility barriers and allow the ecosystem to focus on what matters most: improving efficiency, privacy, security, and miner autonomy, ultimately leading to increased profitability.”
