Stratum V2 Could Reshape Bitcoin Mining's Power Structure — Here's the Technical Case

[lingriiddd]

The Stratum V2 protocol upgrade is not just an efficiency improvement — it is an attempt to fundamentally rebalance the power dynamics between large mining pools and the individual miners who contribute hashrate to them. Under the current Stratum V1 protocol, mining pools construct the block templates that specify which transactions are included in each block they mine. Individual miners have no input into that process; they simply receive work from the pool and execute it. This means that a small number of large pool operators — led by Foundry at nearly 30% of global hashrate and AntPool at roughly 17.7% — effectively control which transactions get included in the majority of Bitcoin blocks, a centralization of transaction selection that critics have long argued is incompatible with Bitcoin's decentralized ethos.
Stratum V2 addresses this directly by enabling a mode where individual miners can select their own block templates rather than receiving them from the pool, while still contributing their hashrate to the pool's collective mining effort. This decentralizes transaction selection in a meaningful way: instead of a single pool operator deciding what goes in every block the pool mines, thousands of individual miners can each construct their own template, distributing that decision-making power across the network.

The open standard dimension of the working group's effort matters because it ensures this capability is available to any miner regardless of which pool they use, rather than being a proprietary feature of a single pool's infrastructure. With the seven pools now collaborating on Stratum V2 collectively representing the vast majority of Bitcoin's global hashrate, successful adoption of the standard would represent one of the most significant structural improvements to Bitcoin mining's decentralization in years — arriving at a moment when economic pressure on miners makes the efficiency gains of the upgraded protocol an additional practical incentive to adopt it.

[cryptohog]

Seven competing pools collaborating on one standard — Bitcoin mining found its rare cooperative moment

[cryptoenthusiast]

Individual miners choosing their own block templates, decentralization said let me back into this conversation please

[ChewBeast]

Foundry at nearly 30% huge