Foundry Digital Donates 1 BTC to Fund Bitcoin Mining Pools – Bitcoin Magazine
- Foundry Digital has donated 1 BTC to a pseudonymous open source developer – 4ss0.
- The developer is working on Stratum V2, a communication protocol for miners and mining pools.
- Specifically, the developer will improve the decentralization of block templates and strengthen the censorship resistance of the protocol.
Foundry Digital, an institutional bitcoin mining service provider, has donated 1 BTC to a pseudonymous developer in the bitcoin ecosystem named 4ss0, who works on Stratum V2, according to a press release.
Stratum V2 is an open source communication protocol that allows miners, their proxies and mining pools to better communicate with each other, enabling greater contributions to the global hash rate of the Bitcoin network. The protocol seeks to provide higher levels of efficiency, security and decentralization to the proof-of-work consensus mechanism that powers Bitcoin.
Stratum V2 changes the standard message format from JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to binary with an additional encryption feature, thus improving communication on the existing Stratum protocol. However, while this functionality is important, 4ss0 will actually dedicate its time to the Job Negotiation Protocol (JNP).
JNP is a subprotocol in Stratum that allows bitcoin miners to create their own block templates. These templates allow for streamlined collaboration by specifying predefined attributes for participating miners while strengthening censorship resistance by decentralizing the creation of block templates.
“The Job Negotiator implementation will increase the decentralization of pool mining, enabling miners to mine their chosen transactions while preventing censorship of transaction propagation by pools,” 4ss0 said. “This will further allow people around the world to benefit from Bitcoin’s limitless freedom.”
In addition to Foundry’s donation, the company will offer 4ss0 access to bitcoin mining application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and hash rate data provided by the Foundry USA Pool team for testing purposes.
“The Bitcoin mining industry has evolved rapidly over the past two years, while the underlying protocol that coordinates the miner and the pool has remained stagnant,” said Jay Beddict, director of research at Foundry. “Foundry sees Stratum V2 as a major improvement over the current Stratum protocol and is in line with our mission to empower decentralized infrastructure.”
