In early May 2026, the "Minority Alliance" in the mining pool world suddenly gathered at the same table: AntPool, Foundry, and F2Pool, three leading mining pools controlling over half of the hash power, along with Block Inc, MARA Foundation, SpiderPool, and DMND announced their participation in the Stratum V2 working group. This protocol upgrade project, originally set in an engineering context, was amplified by Chinese media to a broader market perspective around May 10. Since 2012, Stratum V1 has been the backbone of communication between mining pools and miners, but has faced severe criticism for data manipulation, risks of intermediary attacks, and the almost complete lack of autonomy for miners in transaction packaging. The current concentration of hash power has continually brought the question of "who actually controls Bitcoin block production" to the forefront. Stratum V2, in an open standard format, attempts to replace V1 and is seen as a tool for rewriting the power structure in the communication layer, improving network security and resistance to censorship. The involvement of traditional financial technology firms like Block Inc in this working group signifies that traditional fintech capital is directly participating in the reconstruction of underlying mining protocols. For institutions and macro funds that incorporate network security, hash power concentration, and governance decentralization into their valuation models, this is not merely a news item for short-term speculation but a structural signal that could alter Bitcoin's long-term risk premium and the boundaries of macro narratives.

Old Protocol Hijacks Hash Power: Centralization Risks Accumulate to Today

Before firms like Block Inc joined the new protocol working group, Bitcoin mining had already operated for over a decade on a "sick" communication standard. Since 2012, Stratum V1 has served as the mainstream protocol between mining pools and miners, fulfilling early expansion tasks while quietly locking down hash power governance on the mining pool side: miners receive task templates issued by mining pools and typically have no say in which transactions are packaged into blocks. Transaction selection strategies, profit distribution logic, and potential censorship rules are all centralized in the servers of a few operational entities. Worse still, V1 has repeatedly been pointed out to have security flaws such as data manipulation and intermediary attacks, which means that in extreme cases, hash power can not only be "politicized" by mining pools but could also be hijacked, rewritten, and redirected on the communication link.

This design flaw, compounded by industrial evolution, amplifies the risk into a structural issue: the current top three mining pools (Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool) collectively control over 50% of Bitcoin hash power, and according to a singular source cited by Chinese media Odaily Planet Daily, Foundry alone accounts for about 30% of global Bitcoin mining pool hash power. In such a scenario, the protocol level hands over decision-making power to mining pools, while the industrial level concentrates hash power in leading pools, theoretically allowing a few entities to exert significant influence over transaction selection on the network—from prioritizing the packaging of "compliant" transactions to selectively ignoring specific addresses under regulatory pressure, no longer mere technical discussions. For institutions and macro funds accustomed to applying risk premiums to "discount" assets, this single point of failure and censorship tail risk shaped by the old protocol and hash power concentration has long been ingrained in Bitcoin's long-term pricing model, becoming an institutional discount weighing on the valuation of this "digital asset-based monetary system."

Mining Pool Giants Assemble for Stratum V2 Reordering

The list of participants joining the Stratum V2 working group cannot simply be treated as "normal technical cooperation": the three major pools, AntPool, F2Pool, Foundry, alongside SpiderPool and DMND, combined with financial technology companies like MARA Foundation and Block Inc, appear together in the same group photo advocating for the standardization of open protocols. According to a singular source cited by Chinese media Odaily Planet Daily, Foundry controls approximately 30% of global Bitcoin mining pool hash power; while this figure itself has limitations, when combined with the common knowledge that the "top three pools collectively exceed 50% hash power," it sufficiently highlights the significance of this alignment. When those with over half the hash power shift from "each maintaining private implementations" to betting on a new open standard protocol, the industry's power structure effectively acknowledges in public that the old Stratum V1 is no longer a protective moat but has begun to turn into a liability in compliance and security narratives.

The aim of the Stratum V2 working group is to develop open standards for communication between mining pool operators and miners, attempting to address the structural deficiencies left by V1 in terms of security, centralization risk, and resistance to censorship. Now, with the leading hash power actively participating in rule design, how hash power will be redistributed among different pools in the future will no longer simply be a matter of "who offers lower rates and faster settlements," but will add the new question of "who can provide stronger autonomy and security margins under the new protocol." For regulators, facing a group willing to negotiate based on open protocols, versus a bunch of isolated black box service providers, the leverage in hand changes entirely; for miners and the network, they will need to reassess their risk-reward ratios amid the new standards shaped by top pools and traditional centralized operations. This gathering of protocols led by dominant hash power is, in essence, reordering the landscape for the next round of Bitcoin hash power and regulatory battles.

Resistance Narrative Upgrade: Regulatory Iron Fist Harder to Land

The high concentration of hash power has enabled regulatory bodies and sanctioning organizations to follow a "simple script": focus on a few mining pools and their sensitive jurisdictions, and in extreme situations, using regulatory pressure or compliance orders to require these hash power gateways to filter, delay, or even refuse to package specific transactions. Currently, the top three mining pools collectively control over 50% of hash power, and according to a singular source cited by Chinese media Odaily Planet Daily, Foundry accounts for around 30% of global Bitcoin mining pool hash power. In contexts of geopolitical tensions and financial sanctions, such concentrations imply that "technical gateway + geopolitical coordinates" are accurately marked; if communication protocols have flaws such as data manipulation or intermediary attacks, regulators or malicious actors can exert pressure not only legally but may also directly interfere with transaction flows through technical means.

Stratum V2 is advancing in the form of open standards, and the narrative shift lies not in "no regulation," but in making it harder for the regulatory iron fist to find a single point to strike: the protocols are transparent, rules are public, and communication security between mining pools and miners has improved, deliberately reducing centralization risks, which means miners' participation and visibility in the transaction packaging process are enhanced, making it harder for a few protocol black boxes and jurisdictions to exercise total control. For institutions and sovereign funds considering Bitcoin as a "digital sovereign asset," this systematically weakens the probability of tail scenarios where a few mining pools jointly turn off during a geopolitical conflict or escalation of sanctions; within macro pricing frameworks, such extreme scenarios would translate to additional risk premiums. With leading mining pools and entities like Block Inc betting on Stratum V2, it sends a signal to the market: technical governance is actively hedging against this concentrated censorship risk. Even a slight reduction in tail risk weighting is enough to enhance Bitcoin's capital allocation relative to other risk assets in long-term portfolio models, providing a stronger safety factor for its valuation.

Miner Selling Pressure and On-Chain Fees: The Slow Variables of Market Dynamics

For miners, Stratum V2 is not just "a safer protocol," but a tool that directly rewrites the cash flow curve. It aims to replace the Stratum V1 that has been in use since 2012, described publicly as offering higher communication reliability and efficiency—this means that the back-and-forth of hash power between pools and mining sites is wasted less frequently and is less likely to be interrupted by intermediary attacks or data manipulation. Hash power waste and communication anomalies are essentially invisible costs: every time there is an invalid submission, it adds to a loss not accounted for in the P&L. In the long run, a more efficient and secure communication protocol is expected to reduce such uncontrollable losses and smooth out miners' daily income fluctuations. Miners typically sell off some of the mined BTC periodically to cover operational costs, and when income fluctuations are extreme, passive selling pressure often accumulates at unfavorable price points; if Stratum V2 can lower "technical noise," miners would have more leeway to shift their selling rhythm from “forced bleeding” to “orderly cashing out,” which means the spot market would experience a smoother short-term selling pressure curve under the same total supply.

Also being slowly rewritten is the pricing of block space. Bitcoin block capacity is limited, and fee income highly depends on miners' packaging strategies. Stratum V1 has previously been criticized for limiting miners' autonomy in transaction selection, effectively placing a layer between the market signal of "who bids the highest for block space." Stratum V2 emerges as an open standard and is viewed as an attempt to improve security and resistance to censorship; if it also releases more granular transaction choices, miners would have stronger incentives to optimize their packaging logic around fee signals. The outcome may not necessarily be an immediate drop in absolute fee levels, but rather an increase in the predictability of fee structures and congestion patterns: during high-demand periods, fees would more resemble a rationally bid "clearing price," rather than being dictated by technical or governance noise from a few concentrated hash power nodes. For institutions and DeFi structures that use BTC as their primary collateral or reserve asset, long-term fee and congestion trends are already factored into risk pricing models; once miner selling pressure rhythms and block space pricing mechanisms become more stable and explicable due to protocol upgrades, the discount rate for BTC as a store of value and collateral will decrease, leading to more allocation of funds between BTC and other public chain assets like ETH around slow variables such as "long-term on-chain costs and availability," rather than short-term emotional fluctuations.

This is Not Tomorrow's Market, But It May Be the Foundation of the Next Bull Market

Bringing top mining pools such as AntPool, Foundry, and F2Pool together with Block Inc at the same table to advance a new standard to replace Stratum V1, which has been in place since 2012, is fundamentally a gradual rewriting of Bitcoin's "underlying governance and security parameters," rather than creating the next daily candlestick surge. In the short term, the market is likely to respond as it would to most technical governance news, offering limited pricing—factors such as the establishment date of the working group, specific technical routes, and the extent to which it can cover hash power currently lack quantifiable certainty, making it difficult for funds to significantly adjust risk premiums at present. However, in the medium to long term, the alliance around Stratum V2 will be incorporated into the frameworks of institutions and macro funds regarding BTC: if the security of mining communication increases and miners’ autonomy in transaction selection is enhanced, expectations for network resistance to censorship and governance decentralization will rise, which means there is room for a downward adjustment in the security and political risk premiums demanded by BTC, and its stance as a "crypto beta" and collateral asset will be reemphasized in allocation models. In the transaction and tracking layers, what to observe will no longer be just the narrative heat of V2, but three hard indicators: first, whether the proportion of hash power actually connecting to V2 can continue to climb; second, whether the concentration pattern of over 50% hash power among the top three pools is marginally diluted; and third, whether the regulatory attitude towards mining pool operations and protocol standardization in the future encourages diversification or enforces control. As long as the direction of these variables gradually converges to the combination of "stronger security, weaker expectations of centralization, and no additional regulatory pressure," Bitcoin's long-term discount rate and the valuation anchor for all crypto risk assets will unknowingly be pushed toward a new, more favorable balance point.

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