Seven Mining Giants Join Stratum V2 Working Group
Seven major mining operations joined the Stratum V2 Working Group on May 7, with the new members collectively controlling over 66% of Bitcoin's hashrate. The additions include ANTPOOL, Foundry, F2Pool, Block, Spiderpool, MARA Foundation and DMND.
Key Takeaway
The seven new members control over 66% of Bitcoin's hashrate, giving Stratum V2 critical mass for industry adoption.
ANTPOOL CEO Andy Zhou said the move enables the industry to collaborate more effectively and drive improvements in efficiency, security and decentralization. The seven organizations joined the working group founded by Braiins and Spiral in 2022.
Stratum V2 upgrades the original Stratum mining protocol with end-to-end encryption and lets individual miners produce their own block templates when pools support the feature. The protocol also brings efficiency gains for managing large mining fleets and improves overall mining decentralization through its open, vendor-neutral specification.
Foundry controls 31% of Bitcoin's hashrate at 310 exahashes per second, making it the largest pool among the new members. ANTPOOL follows with 15% market share and 152 exahashes per second, while Spiderpool holds 10% at 105 exahashes per second and F2Pool has 10% at 97 exahashes per second.
Spiderpool CTO Kenway Wang said decentralization is core to the company's mission, and Stratum V2 supports this by enabling miner-constructed templates while improving efficiency for miners in bandwidth-constrained environments. The protocol's privacy and security features address longstanding concerns about mining pool centralization.
Notable absences include ViaBTC with 11% market share and SecPool with 6%, both ranking among the top mining pools globally. The working group now represents over 66% of Bitcoin's total hashrate through its member pools as of May 8, 2026.
This article was written based on reporting from Bitcoin Magazine.
