What Is Stratum V2?
When most miners choose a pool, they think they're choosing who manages their payouts. But they're also choosing who gets to decide which transactions make it into the blocks. Stratum V2 splits those two decisions apart.
Two decisions bundled into one
Picking a pool looks like a payout decision. Under the hood, it's also a decision about block content. Today, that second decision is usually made by the pool operator: they assemble the block template, and the miners pointed at the pool produce whatever the operator tells them to. The miner supplies the hashpower; the operator decides what it confirms.
What Stratum V2 changes
Stratum V2 changes that. It gives miners the ability to choose which transactions are included in the blocks they mine, while still getting the benefits of pooled mining and coordinated payouts. You don't have to give up predictable rewards to reclaim control over block content — you can have both.
A governance upgrade, not just a technical one
That might sound like a technical upgrade, but it's really a governance upgrade. Who decides what a network confirms is a question about power, not just protocol. A network is more resilient when that decision-making is distributed rather than concentrated in a handful of operators — and Stratum V2 is what moves it back toward distributed.
It's also the foundation the Sovright Mining Pool is built on. Our Stratum V2 implementation is open source, and the pool is live on testnet now — you can point a CPU miner at it today, no special hardware required, to see miner-controlled transaction selection working end to end.