A Miner Just Built Its Own Bitcoin Block: Inside GoMining's Stratum V2 First

Who decides which transactions go into a Bitcoin block? \ For most of the network's history the honest answer has been uncomfortable: not the miners who spend the electricity, but the handful of pools they point their machines at. On a block mined this month, GoMining set out to change that answer, and in doing so produced what it says is the first known Bitcoin block built end to end on the Stratum V2 protocol. \ The mechanism is a Stratum V2 feature called Job Declaration, delivered through the DMND pool, which let GoMining construct and declare its own block template rather than accept a pre-built one. The block was not a test transaction sent to nowhere: it carried live traffic from GoBTC Pay , the company's open Bitcoin payments protocol, which makes it less a laboratory demonstration than an early production deployment of an idea the mining industry has debated for years. \ The quiet centralisation nobody voted for To understand why a single block is news, look at who builds the rest of them. Bitcoin's security model assumes that block production is spread across many independent hands, yet the reality of 2026 is the opposite: Foundry USA alone accounts for roughly a quarter of network hashrate and AntPool for around 18 percent , so two organisations sit behind close to half of every block, and a mere five pools behind roughly three-quarters. \ \ That concentration would matter less if the pools were neutral conduits, but under Stratum V1, the protocol most of them still run , the pool builds the block template and the miner simply hashes against it, with no say over which transactions are included or in what order. The fact that the dominant pools have not engaged in obvious censorship to date is reassuring, but it is a matter of trust rather than design, and trust is precisely the thing Bitcoin was built to remove. \ The deeper problem is that scale and miner control pull in opposite directions: the pools with the most hashpower tend to offer the least say over block construction, while the pools that hand control back to miners remain small. Plot the two against each other and the picture is stark, with the giants clustered where miner control is lowest and a thin group of decentralisation-minded pools, DMND now among them, sitting alone in the corner where miners build their own blocks. \ \ What actually changed in this block Strip away the protocol jargon and the shift is simple to state: the question of who chooses a block's contents moved from the pool to the miner. Under the old arrangement the pool builds the template and the miner just hashes; under Stratum V2's Job Declaration the miner builds the template and the pool is left to coordinate the payout, which is the part miners actually want a pool for. \ \ GoMining's leadership frames the milestone as a proof that the two halves of mining, pooled economics and individual control, no longer have to be traded against each other. \ For DMND, the pool that carried the block, the point was that the architecture held up in production rather than on a testnet. "A miner just mined the first Stratum V2 block to power their own product end to end. GoMining declared the template and included their GoBTC Pay payments with no pool in the way. We built DMND for exactly this," said Alejandro De La Torre, CEO and co-founder at DMND. Stratum V2 also brings benefits beyond control, since it encrypts the connection end to end and cuts mining bandwidth by roughly 60 percent on the pool side and 70 percent for miners , closing off the hashrate hijacking and surveillance that the plaintext V1 protocol left exposed. \ A fourteen-year road to a miner-built block The milestone reads as sudden, but it sits at the end of a long arc. Stratum V1 shipped in 2012 and became the silent default; the Stratum V2 Working Group was founded in 2022 by Braiins and Spiral and treated for years as a niche side project; Bitcoin Core added experimental Stratum V2 support in version 30 in October 2025 ; and in May 2026 the politics shifted decisively when seven of the largest pools, representing close to 75 percent of hashrate, agreed to back the standard . \ GoMining's block is the moment that arc touches a shipping product rather than a specification, which is why it functions as a marker even though, on its own, it is a single block among hundreds of thousands. \ Why a payments company wanted its own block The choice of payload is the tell. GoMining is not only a miner but the operator of GoBTC Pay, an open, non-custodial Bitcoin payments protocol it launched at Consensus Miami in May 2026 , designed to make base-layer Bitcoin usable at the point of sale with no fee for the end user and a 0.2 percent charge to merchants. A payments network lives or dies on whether its transactions actually get confirmed, and most payment companies depend on third-party pools to do that confirming, which means depending on someone else's template-selection priorities. \ By mining the blocks itself through a dedicated pool , GoMining removes that dependency, and Stratum V2 is what lets it do so without leaving the pooled model that makes mining revenue predictable. With five million users and a top-ten position by hashrate , the company is large enough that controlling its own settlement path is a genuine product advantage rather than a gesture, particularly given its stated goal of 12-hour on-chain settlement by the end of 2026. \ What to Watch For The milestone is real, but it should not be oversold, and several caveats deserve to sit in plain view. \ It changes who selects transactions, not who holds the hashpower. Stratum V2 hands template construction to miners, yet it does nothing to dilute hashrate concentration itself , so Foundry and AntPool remain as large tomorrow as they were yesterday. The reform addresses the censorship surface, not the underlying market structure. \ A commitment is not a deployment. The widely cited 75 percent figure describes pools that have agreed to adopt the standard, whereas live usage remains far smaller, with perhaps 15 to 20 percent of hashrate running Stratum V2 in some form . The practical benefit for ordinary miners arrives only when the big pools enable Job Declaration for their users, and DMND, the pool behind this block, is itself a small player. \ Self-confirmation introduces a different question. A payments operator that mines the blocks confirming its own payments has solved a dependency problem by concentrating a different kind of influence over ordering and inclusion, even as it decentralises away from third-party pools. GoBTC Pay's 2-of-3 multi-signature design , with GoMining as one of three parties, mitigates custody risk but does not erase the broader point that vertical integration trades one form of trust for another. \ The economics are unforgiving. Miners are operating on thin margins, with hashprice near breakeven and an estimated fifth of the network unprofitable , which could slow voluntary adoption of more complex setups even though translation proxies let existing firmware connect without hardware changes. \ None of this diminishes the achievement. It simply locates it correctly: as the first working proof that miner-built blocks can power a live product, and as an early test of whether the industry's stated commitment to Stratum V2 becomes the default rather than the exception. \ Don't forget to like and share the story! :::tip Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR. ::: \