A group of crypto companies led by Bitcoin mining technology provider Braiins and the Block Inc subsidiary that finances Bitcoin development called Spiral are promoting the adoption of the Stratum V2 protocol.

The initiative is set to update Stratum V1 (the current Bitcoin mining pool protocol) that miners use to control how miners communicate with pool servers.

The Stratum V1 update would improve miner and network security, help further decentralize the network, and make communication more efficient, according to a joint statement from Braiins and Spiral.

The second version of Stratum (V2) promises to bring many improvements to the protocol, including censorship resistance and allowing miners to choose their own work instead of having workloads assigned to them by pools, as a result, it would increase mining decentralization. Bitcoin network. The upgrade is a necessary step to support an increase in pooled mining and further growth in hashrate, the report explains.

The working group is now focused on building and sharing tools for all mining companies to quickly and seamlessly upgrade to the Stratum V2 protocol.

According to the announcement, the working group has released the first version of an open source Stratum V2 reference implementation (SRI) for testing. SRI will allow anyone to run the updated protocol or use it as a guide for their own implementation of Stratum V2, according to the report.

The joint statement said the working group plans to release a new “more robust” version of SRI with more features in early November.

Crypto exchange BitMEX, crypto financial services firm Galaxy Digital, crypto mining and gambling company Foundry, and Bitcoin educational program Summer of Bitcoin are among the task force members providing support to key Stratum V2 developers. . Spiral and Braiins invited interested parties to participate in the group in their joint report published yesterday.

Miners are “very well aware of the benefits of Stratum V2,” but pushing the mining industry past the “remaining development and adoption hurdles” is a “major task,” Braiins co-founder Jan Capek said in the report.

The Stratum V2 protocol push comes at a time when mining difficulty has increased by 13.55% to an all-time high. Blockchain.News reported on the matter. As individual activity becomes more difficult and competitive over time, Bitcoin mining has switched to a pooled resource model that significantly reduces payout volatility. Miners join pools, pay a service fee to the pool, and earn a constant portion of block reward payments relative to the provided hash.

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