The below is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1179: “Stratum V2 progress spotted in the wild.” Sign up for the newsletter here.
Here’s something very encouraging to see; a working demo of Stratum V2 in the wild. Even better, a working demo dropping on the same day as a thorough report on Stratum V2 from the mining team at Galaxy Digital.
For those of you freaks who are unaware of or have forgotten what Stratum V2 is and why it’s important; it is a new mining pool protocol that, if widely adopted, would help to make the mining pool layer of bitcoin more robust and decentralized by allowing individual miners to construct their own blocks. On top of the decentralization benefits it will provide privacy and efficiency benefits for miners as well.
As Galaxy points out in their research report, the time for a mining pool protocol is way overdue. Especially when one considers the amount of hashrate that has come and will continue to be added to the network moving forward. The stakes are high and rising and the protection Stratum V2 provides against man-in-the-middle attacks is something that every miner needs as scrutiny of the bitcoin network increases.
It is incredible to see that there is material progress being made to bring Stratum V2 to market beyond what the team at Braiins has already done via their firmware. This is important work that cannot be overstated.
Speaking of Braiins, they wrote a quick summary of the Galaxy report here if you don’t feel like reading the whole things.
Onward!