Bitcoin mining’s biggest decentralization move in years has quietly taken place, with seven of the largest mining pools agreeing to support the same open standards.
The Stratum V2 working group announced last week that Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, MARA Pool, Block Inc and DMND have joined the working group.
Stratum V2 is an open source protocol that governs how mining pools communicate with individual miners in the pool. The biggest practical change it introduces is letting individual miners build their own block templates, meaning the choice of which transactions are included in each new block lies with the miners, not the people running the mining pools.
According to the computing power index data, Foundry alone controls 34.2% of the global Bitcoin computing power, AntPool accounts for 14.2%, F2Pool accounts for 11.3%, SpiderPool accounts for 10.5%, and MARA Pool accounts for 4.7%. Along with other signatories of Stratum V2, the seven mining pools now supporting the standard represent nearly 75% of all Bitcoin hashing power.
Under the current Stratum V1 standard, transaction selection for nearly every new block is handled by mining pool operators rather than individual miners actually doing the work. This concentration has been the loudest structural concern in modern mining over the past two years.
Stratum V2 doesn’t change hashrate concentration, but it does change who decides what goes into each block, which is the part that the Bitcoin community is really worried about.
It is not ideal for a single mining pool to control more than 30% of the computing power, because the same mining pool that determines the order of transactions for that share of blocks is the actual risk that people have pointed out.
The agreement has existed since 2022 when Braiins and Spiral co-founded the working group. Until now, it has been viewed as a niche project with limited adoption. The addition of Foundry and AntPool makes it truly impactful, and the working group sees this move as the beginning of a new phase of accelerated deployment.
The timing also fits with issues the wider mining community is dealing with. CoinShares estimates that as many as 20% of miners are currently unprofitable, with the hash price (the revenue miners earn per unit of computing power) at $38.57 per petahash per day, at or near breakeven for operators running mid-generation hardware.
According to CoinWarz, the difficulty will rise again on May 15, from 132.47T to 135.64T. The network hash rate is now 998 exahash per second.
