Seven major global Bitcoin mining institutions—Antpool, F2Pool, Foundry, Spiderpool, Block, MARA Foundation, and DMND—have officially joined the Stratum V2 working group, marking a significant step toward Bitcoin mining's transition to the next-generation open-source protocol. Compared to the current V1 version, where transaction packaging is controlled by mining pools, Stratum V2 introduces end-to-end encryption. This not only reduces bandwidth usage (by 60% on the pool side and 70% on the miner side) and mitigates hashrate hijacking risks but also allows miners to build their own block templates. Tests show that with lower latency and better fee selection, the V2 protocol can increase miners' earnings by up to 7.4%. (Bitcoin com) https://(wublock123.com)/news/seven-major-mining-pools-join-stratum-v2-enable-miner-block-choice-60800