DEMAND Launches Bitcoin Mining Pool With Stratum V2, Promises Improved Security and Performance
Bitcoin mining company DEMAND announced today the launch of the world’s first Stratum V2 mining pool, built using the open-source Stratum Reference Implementation (SRI). This new pool seeks to improve security, flexibility, and performance in Bitcoin mining through the use of the updated protocol.
The Stratum V2 protocol offers a range of enhancements over the previous Stratum version, providing miners more control and helping decentralize Bitcoin mining.
One of the key features of Stratum V2 is empowering individual miners to build their own block templates when mining Bitcoin. In the past, mining pool operators controlled transaction selection when creating blocks, leading to centralization risks. With Stratum V2, miners can now choose which transactions to include in blocks themselves.
“Because Bitcoin mining is overwhelmingly done through mining pools, transaction selection has become relatively centralized: only a few mining pool operators can essentially decide to collude and prevent that certain transactions ever confirm,” DEMAND co-founder and SRI project lead Filippo Merli said in a press release. “Stratum V2 gives the power of transaction selection back to the individual miners, to make the mining ecosystem more decentralized and Bitcoin more censorship resistant.”
To utilize the capabilities of Stratum V2, miners will need to run the proxy and set up a Bitcoin node for receiving transactions. DEMAND plans to incentivize miners to create their own block templates by lowering fees for these users. This should promote more decentralized, full node Bitcoin mining.
Currently, DEMAND’s mining pool is focused entirely on solo miners, allowing them to find blocks independently and receive the full mining reward. DEMAND
