Seven major Bitcoin mining pools and companies have joined the Stratum V2 working group to help develop an open standard for communication between mining pool operators and individual miners.
AntPool, Block Inc., F2Pool, Foundry, MARA Foundation, SpiderPool and DMND joined the working group to collaborate on the mining-pool communication standard, according to a Stratum V2 announcement.
Stratum V2 is designed to improve mining efficiency, reduce latency and allow job negotiation, giving individual miners more influence over block templates rather than relying entirely on pool operators.
“Bitcoin mining is competitive and fragmented by design. It is a race for efficiency where a millisecond can determine whether a miner wins a block or loses to a competitor,” the announcement said.
Foundry and AntPool are the two largest Bitcoin mining pools by hashrate, the total amount of computing power deployed by miners to secure the Bitcoin network.
Foundry controls nearly 30% of the global mining pool hashrate, and AntPool controls about 17.7%, according to data from Hashrate Index.
Mining pools broken down by the share of global Bitcoin mining hashrate they control. Source: Hashrate Index
Developing an open standard for Bitcoin mining pools that is not controlled by any one mining pool operator helps decentralize the mining industry, which has become increasingly centralized, while also giving miners greater flexibility in choosing block templates.
Related: Tether launches open-source mining framework to unify Bitcoin infrastructure
Bitcoin miners face rising difficulty, energy costs
The Bitcoin mining difficulty, the relative challenge of adding new blocks to the ledger, is projected to rise again in the next difficulty adjustment in May.
“The next Bitcoin difficulty adjustment is estimated to take place on May 15, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC, increasing the Bitcoin mining difficulty from 132.47 T to 135.64 T,” according to CoinWarz.
Bitcoin mining difficulty continues to increase over the long term. Source: CoinWarz
Rising network difficulty and increasing energy costs are placing additional pressure on the already competitive Bitcoin mining industry.
Up to 20% of Bitcoin miners are unprofitable under current crypto market and economic conditions, according to asset manager CoinShares.
Hashprice, a key measure of miner revenue per unit of computing power, fell to between $36 and $38 per petahash per second per day, near breakeven levels for some miners, CoinShares said.
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