For over a decade, Bitcoin mining pools have quietly held one of the most consequential powers in the network: deciding which transactions get included in blocks. That era just got its first real crack.
DMND, the world’s first native Stratum V2 mining pool, successfully mined Bitcoin block 955,318 on June 25, 2026. The block was constructed by GoMining using Stratum V2’s Job Declaration feature, making it the first documented instance of a miner independently building its own block template in a production environment.
Why this block is different from every block before it
When the original Stratum protocol (now called V1) was introduced in 2012, it created a model where mining pools, not individual miners, decided which transactions went into blocks. Miners contributed hash power and received payouts, but they had zero say in what actually got built.
Stratum V2 flips that dynamic. Miners can now propose their own block templates to the pool for validation, rather than blindly accepting whatever the pool hands them. The pool still coordinates payouts and smooths revenue, but the miner gets to choose which transactions to include.
