Something just shifted in Bitcoin mining. DMND, a mining pool built around the Stratum V2 protocol, has produced the first known block where an individual miner — not the pool — chose which transactions made it in.
The block, number 955,318, was mined for GoMining, a top-ten Bitcoin miner by hashrate. They used Stratum V2’s Job Declaration feature to build their own block template and include transactions from GoBTC Pay, their instant payments protocol announced at Consensus Miami back in May.
Here’s why that matters. Right now, most Bitcoin miners point their hashrate at a pool and the pool decides what goes into each block. Miners don’t get a say. Stratum V2 flips that — you keep the income smoothing of pooled mining but get to construct your own block template.
“A miner just mined the first Stratum V2 block to power their own product end to end,” said Alejandro De La Torre, DMND’s CEO. “GoMining declared the template and included their GoBTC Pay payments with no pool in the way.”
GoMining CEO Mark Zalan put it plainly: pools have controlled transaction selection for years. Now miners can take that back. It’s a meaningful change for censorship resistance — if Stratum V2 sees broader adoption, the decision of what enters the blockchain shifts from pool operators to the miners themselves.
GoMining serves five million users and runs data centers in the US and internationally. DMND says it built its entire pool around Stratum V2, with Job Declaration running in production now.
