Seven major mining pools, representing 75% of Bitcoin's hashrate, have signed the Stratum V2 standard agreement.
The seven largest mining pools in the world—Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, MARA Pool, Block Inc, and DMND—have signed up to the Stratum V2 protocol, representing nearly 75% of the total global Bitcoin mining power. Mining pools are where many Miners pool their computing power to increase their chances of finding a new Block and then Chia the rewards. The long-standing problem is that under the old Stratum V1 standard, it was the pools, not the Miners , that decided which transactions were recorded in Bitcoin Block , leaving a small group of organizations controlling most of the network's content.
Stratum V2 addresses this by giving individual Miners the power to choose their transactions directly, marking the biggest decentralization step in the Bitcoin mining industry in years. This event comes amidst a challenging mining environment where approximately 20% of Miners are operating at a loss and network difficulty is expected to continue increasing on May 15th.
