Foundry Digital, an institutional service provider for bitcoin mining, has donated 1 BTC to a pseudonymous developer in the bitcoin ecosystem by the name of 4ss0, who is working on Stratum V2, according to a press release.
Stratum V2 is an open-source communications protocol that allows miners, their proxies, and mining pools to better communicate with one another enabling larger contributions to the global hashrate of the Bitcoin network. The protocol seeks to provide higher levels of efficiency, security and decentralization to the proof-of-work consensus mechanism powering Bitcoin.
Stratum V2 changes the default messaging format from JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to binary with an added encryption feature, thereby improving communication on the existing Stratum protocol. However, while this functionality is important, 4ss0 will actually be dedicating their time to the Job Negotiation Protocol (JNP).
JNP is a sub-protocol within Stratum that enables bitcoin miners to create their own block templates. These templates allow for streamlined cooperation by setting predefined attributes for participating miners while strengthening censorship resistance by decentralizing the creation of block templates.
“The Job Negotiator implementation will increase the decentralization of pool mining, enabling miners to mine their chosen transactions while preventing the censorship of transaction propagation by pools,” said 4ss0. “This will further allow people around the world to benefit from Bitcoin’s borderless freedom.”
In addition to Foundry’s donation, the company will offer 4ss0 access to bitcoin mining application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and hash rate data provided by the Foundry USA Pool team for testing purposes.
“The bitcoin mining industry has evolved rapidly in the past two years, while the underlying protocol that coordinates the miner and the pool has stayed stagnant,” said Jay Beddict, VP of research at Foundry. “Foundry views Stratum V2 as a major improvement to the current Stratum protocol and is aligned with our mission of empowering decentralized infrastructure.”