Foundry Digital Donates Bitcoin To Mining Pool Developer

Stratum V2 is an open-source protocol that defines how Bitcoin miners, proxies, and mining pools communicate in order to contribute hashrate to the global Bitcoin network. Foundry Digital LLC (“Foundry”), a top service provider for organizations in the digital asset mining and staking industry, announced a grant of 1 BTC to a pseudonymous developer who goes by the name of “4ss0.”

The Proof-of-Work coordination layer that connects the miner to the pool is significantly improved by Stratum V2 because it offers higher levels of efficiency, security, and decentralization. This is made possible by changing the default messaging to binary rather than JSON and adding encryption. The communication between the miner and the pool is significantly improved by Stratum V2 over the original Stratum protocol.

4ss0 will use the donated funds to concentrate on implementing the Job Negotiation Protocol in Stratum V2. Job Negotiation is a Stratum sub-protocol that enables miners to construct their own block templates and will increase Bitcoin’s resistance to censorship by decentralizing block template creation.

Foundry will also connect the developer and the Stratum V2 team with the Foundry USA Pool team in order to provide access to Bitcoin ASIC machines for testing purposes.

Vice President of Research at Foundry Jay Beddict recognizes that the Bitcoin mining industry has experienced rapid growth and development over the last few years. However, he also understands that the underlying protocol for connecting miners to pools has seen little to no development over the same period.

Beddict states his optimism on future opportunities:

Foundry views Stratum V2 as a major improvement to the current Stratum protocol and is aligned with our mission of empowering decentralized infrastructure. The Job Negotiation Protocol specifically is critical to the further decentralization of the mining industry and the hardening of Bitcoin's censorship resistance. We look forward to the developments in this space and are proud to support the open-source community.

4ss0 adds that with the Job Negotiator implementation, decentralization will increase while miners will be able to mine any transaction they choose without the concern for being censored by pools. 4ss0 sees this development as a way for more users around the world to take advantage of Bitcoin’s borderless features.

Foundry will disburse grant payments over the course of 4ss0’s development work.