Bitcoin mining pools with 75% of BTC hashrate join open standard for block construction
Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, and MARA Pool are among seven pools joining the Stratum V2 working group, putting nearly three-quarters of global bitcoin hashrate behind a protocol that returns block construction decisions to individual miners.
What to know:
- Seven of the world’s largest bitcoin mining pools, representing nearly 75% of global hashrate, have agreed to adopt the Stratum V2 protocol, marking the biggest decentralization shift in mining in years.
- Stratum V2 allows individual miners, rather than pool operators, to choose which transactions go into new blocks, addressing long-standing concerns about centralized control over transaction selection.
- The move comes as miners face tight economics, with an estimated 20% operating unprofitably and network difficulty and hashrate continuing to climb.
Stratum V2 is an open-source protocol governing how mining pools communicate with the individual miners in those pools. The biggest practical change it introduces is letting individual miners construct their own block templates, meaning the choice of which transactions get included in each new block sits with the miner rather than whoever operates the pool.
Foundry alone controls 34.2% of global bitcoin hashrate, AntPool another 14.2%, F2Pool 11.3%, and SpiderPool 10.5%, with MARA Pool adding 4.7%, per Hashrate Index data. Together with the rest of the Stratum V2 signatories, the seven pools now backing the standard represent close to 75% of all bitcoin hashrate.
Under the current Stratum V1 standard, the transaction selection for nearly every new block sits with the pool operators rather than the individual miners actually doing the work. That concentration has been the loudest structural concern about modern mining for the past two years.
