Stratum V2 is a new protocol that aims to improve how pooled mining works. It lets individual miners select transaction sets to be included in blocks, rather than the pool operator making these decisions. This is a significant improvement to the decentralization of mining, and it makes it harder for governments to force compliance onto mining pools.

Stratum V2 also increases security between pool participants and operators through better encryption, and it makes data transfers between them more efficient. It improves standardization across the board. For Bitcoin users, a notable difference is that Stratum V2 makes the mining of full blocks as efficient as mining empty blocks, which means fewer empty blocks are mined and more transactions get processed.

This creates a more natural balance for transaction fees. The protocol is slowly beginning to get adopted by mining pools after being in development for several years by a variety of collaborators across the development community and mining industry. For more information, visit stratumprotocol.org.