The companies are part of a working group that is trying to get Stratum V2 adopted. Stratum V2 is supposed to make the Bitcoin network less easy to control and more decentralized.
Block (SQ) subsidiary Spiral and bitcoin mining technology provider Braiins are leading a working group to encourage the adoption of updates to the bitcoin mining pool protocol.
The upgrade is the second version of the Stratum protocol, which most miners use to control how their mining machines connect to pool servers. The hashrates of many miners are added together in Bitcoin mining pools, and the rewards are shared among the participants.
The second version of Stratum (V2) promises to improve the protocol in a number of ways, such as making it harder to censor and letting miners choose their own work instead of having pools give them work to do. This could increase the decentralization of the Bitcoin network.
The company that made the world’s first mining pool, which used to be called Slush Pool, is called Braiins. The first version of Stratum came out in 2012, and V2 came out in 2019. Braiins started using V2 in early 2020, but the rest of the industry has been slow to catch on.
The companies said in a press release on Tuesday that the working group will focus on “building and sharing tools for all mining companies to quickly and easily upgrade” to Stratum V2.
Financial services company for crypto Galaxy Digital is a company that mines and stakes crypto. Some of Stratum V2’s key developers are backed by Foundry, the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, and the Bitcoin education program Summer of Bitcoin. These developers are also part of the working group. In their press release, Spiral and Braiins asked people who were interested to join the group. Foundry is owned by the same company that owns CoinDesk, which is Digital Currency Group.
Miners “know the benefits of Stratum V2 very well,” but getting the mining industry to get over the “remaining development and adoption hurdles” is a “big task,” said Braiins co-founder Jan Capek in a press release.
Implementation For Bitcoin Mining Upgrade
A press release says that the working group put out the first version of an open-source Stratum V2 reference implementation (SRI) for testing. In software development, reference implementations are often done by the people who made the product to show how it can be used. Other companies can either use that code as is or use it as a model for their own code.
Braiins Chief Marketing Officer Kristian Csepcsar told CoinDesk that the goal of SRI is to “test the interoperability of all implementations.”
A press release said that early November will see the release of a new version of the SRI that is “more robust” and has more features.
“Universal standards for running and building Stratum V2 and the work of this working group to move the industry forward will give Bitcoin the momentum it needs to finally upgrade from a version of its mining protocol that was built a decade ago,” Capek said.
Under Jack Dorsey’s Block, Spiral supports three developers of Stratum V2: Matt Corallo, Fi3, and Pavlenex. Block has promised to make mining less centralized. According to the press release, other core contributors include Rachel Rybarczyk of Galaxy Digital, 4ss0, an anonymous developer who is paid by Foundry, Chris Coverdale, an independent developer who is paid by BitMEX, and Lorenzo Bonazzi from Summer of Bitcoin.
