Stratum V2

Stratum V2 is a pooled mining protocol designed to replace Stratum V1. It uses bandwidth more efficiently, adds encryption, and gives miners more control over how blocks are built.

The main change is job negotiation. Under V1, pools chose the transaction set and miners supplied hash power. Stratum V2 lets individual miners construct their own block templates, reducing pool control and improving censorship resistance. The protocol also improves device interoperability and communication between miners, proxies, and pools.

Why fund it?

Mining protocol upgrades take specification work, production implementations, testing tools, benchmarking, and compatibility work across real hardware and software stacks. Without funding, that work moves slowly.

OpenSats began supporting the Stratum V2 ecosystem in August 2023 with funding for a testing and benchmarking tool. Support continued with a later grant for the Stratum V2 Reference Implementation, the main open-source codebase for production adopters.

What's next?

Current work centers on the Stratum V2 Reference Implementation (SRI), the main open-source Rust codebase for production adopters. Active grants are funding a unified command-line interface for launching SRI applications, Docker support and binary releases for easier deployment, expanded test coverage, and compatibility testing across Stratum V2 stacks.

As more pools and miners adopt the protocol, block construction moves away from pool-controlled templates and toward individual miners, which makes the network harder to censor.