Why Stratum V2?
Stratum V2 (SV2) upgrades the Stratum mining protocol (SV1), which was introduced in 2012, back when mining was largely for hobbyists. SV2 is engineered for modern mining, eliminating SV1's inefficiencies. Designed by Jan Čapek and Pavel Moravec, together with Matt Corallo, SV2 is now maintained by an independent open source community.
~70% less bandwidth
Reduction for pools and miners
SV1's JSON messages are bandwidth heavy, while SV2 uses a lean binary format, lowering CPU load and cutting bandwidth use by about 60% for pools and 70% for miners, reducing operating costs for the pool, and helping bandwidth-constrained miners run more reliably.
Security
Protecting profit
Stratum V2 secures miner to pool traffic with encryption and authentication. This prevents man in the middle attack that hijacks hashrate by swapping pool credentials and redirects work. Encrypted transport also makes traffic far harder to inspect or tamper with by ISPs, or attackers carrying out large scale routing attacks. SV2 increases transparency and eliminates out of band payments by allowing miners themselves to construct block templates.
Up to 7.4% profit increase
Proven in real-world deployments
Stratum V2's technical upgrades translate into measurable profitability gains. Faster template delivery and lower latency reduce wasted work and capture more transaction fees per block, and combined with improvements like end-to-end encryption and faster block propagation can increase profits by up to 7.4%. Read the case study →
Privacy Improvements
Prevent ISP surveillance
Stratum V2 encrypts mining traffic, preventing Internet Service Provider (ISP) and other network intermediaries from observing plaintext shares and messages. In Stratum V1, this data can be used to infer a miner's hashrate and roughly estimate earnings based on that hashrate.
Transaction Selection
Miners choose what goes in blocks
A few mining pools now dominate Bitcoin's block space, with some acting as proxies for others. Pools can selectively include or exclude transactions, creating censorship risk. Stratum V2 empowers miners to build their own block templates, shifting them from passive hashers to active participants in securing Bitcoin's censorship resistance.
Flexibility
Modular architecture
A free, open-source, modular infrastructure with permissive license, empowering developers to build and innovate. A composable design lets you adopt only the components you need. Integrate gradually without disrupting existing infrastructure, and extend functionality as requirements evolve.
Compatibility
No need to upgrade firmware
Translation proxies allow SV2 pools to accept connections from legacy SV1 firmware. Upgrade your infrastructure incrementally while maintaining full backward compatibility.
Interoperable & Neutral
Community-driven governance
Community-driven governance and clear specifications ensure interoperability, preventing vendor lock-ins and fragmentation. Specifications are maintained by an independent working group anyone can join to help accelerate an open-standard for mining.
