Seven Bitcoin Mining Pools Back Stratum V2 Standard

Seven major Bitcoin mining pools — AntPool, Block Inc, F2Pool, Foundry, MARA Foundation, SpiderPool and DMND — joined the Stratum V2 working group to develop an open, interoperable protocol for pool-to-miner communications. The group said the protocol will standardize how pools deliver mining jobs and block templates to individual miners.

The participants said the shared standard could shorten the time it takes pools to mine blocks and give miners clearer options for block contents. The announcement noted that “Bitcoin mining is competitive and fragmented by design. It is a race for efficiency where a millisecond can determine whether a miner wins a block or loses to a competitor.” The working group said members will collaborate on specification and implementation work within Stratum V2.

Foundry and AntPool are the two largest participants by reported hashrate. Data from Hashrate Index show Foundry controls nearly 30% of global mining pool hashrate, while AntPool holds about 17.7%. The announcement described the effort as an industry-wide standard rather than a protocol controlled by a single operator.

Stratum V2 aims to make the exchange of mining jobs and block templates more efficient and interoperable. Under the current landscape, pools send work and templates using differing, sometimes proprietary systems. The proposed standard would let miners validate or select block templates without needing to rely on a single pool operator’s implementation.

The announcement comes as the network’s mining difficulty is expected to rise in the next adjustment. CoinWarz projects the difficulty will increase from 132.47 trillion to about 135.64 trillion on May 15, 2026, at 5:58 p.m. UTC. Rising difficulty and higher energy costs are increasing pressure on mining operations.

Asset manager CoinShares estimates up to 20% of miners are currently unprofitable under present market and economic conditions. CoinShares also reported that hashprice, a metric of miner revenue measured in dollars per petahash per day, has fallen into a range near $36–$38/PH/s/day, levels that are at or close to breakeven for some miners.

Developers and pool operators involved with Stratum V2 have said the protocol can deliver greater transparency in block construction by allowing miners to inspect or choose templates. The working group described the collaboration as part of a wider push within the mining community toward open-source tools and shared infrastructure standards intended to improve interoperability and provide miners with more choices.