Seven prominent players in the Bitcoin mining ecosystem have joined the Stratum v2 Working Group, a consortium dedicated to developing and maintaining an open, vendor-neutral version of the Stratum mining protocol. The new members — ANTPOOL, Block Inc, F2Pool, Foundry, Spiderpool, MARA Foundation, and DMND — represent a broad swath of the industry, from large mining pools to infrastructure providers.
The Push for Open Mining Standards
The working group was founded in 2022 by Braiins and Spiral to build and maintain the Stratum v2 specification. Stratum v2 is an upgrade to the original Stratum protocol, which for years has handled communication between miners and mining pools. The new version promises efficiency gains, privacy improvements, better security, and — crucially — stronger decentralization.
With these seven organizations now on board, the group gains real-world operational heft. The members operate some of the largest mining fleets and pools, meaning the protocol will face rigorous testing at scale. That's a big leap forward for ensuring proper functioning and compatibility across actual mining operations, the group said.
How Stratum v2 Changes Mining
Stratum v2 supports efficient management of large fleets of miners and end-to-end encryption, but its most notable change is allowing individual miners to produce their own block templates — a feature that shifts some power back from pools to solo miners. Pools that support the new protocol can still coordinate hashrate, but miners get more control over which transactions go into the blocks they mine.
Kenway Wang, CTO of Spiderpool, emphasized that the protocol supports decentralization through miner-constructed templates and improves efficiency for miners in bandwidth-constrained environments. That's a practical concern for operations in remote regions where internet connectivity is limited.
Andy Zhou, CEO of ANTPOOL, expressed support for the open, interoperable standard, saying it will drive improvements in efficiency, security, and decentralization.
What the New Members Bring
Each new member operates at a different point in the mining supply chain. ANTPOOL runs one of the largest mining pools. F2Pool and Foundry are major global pools. Block Inc brings expertise in financial infrastructure. Spiderpool focuses on smaller, distributed miners. MARA Foundation represents one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miners. DMND provides mining hardware and hosting services. Together they cover the full spectrum of mining operations, from pool operators to individual miners to equipment makers.
The working group maintains a public specification and provides a coordination layer between developers and industry stakeholders. That means the protocol isn't just a theoretical document; it's a working standard that pools and miners can implement today.
The group hasn't announced a specific timeline for broader adoption, but the influx of major operators suggests Stratum v2 is moving from the development stage into real-world deployment. The next steps will involve testing the protocol across the member fleets and ironing out any compatibility issues that arise at scale.
