A little tldr on what @sovright_ is buidling with their Stratum protocol Currently Zcash mining is very concentrated. While writing this ViaBTC, Foundry, and F2Pool produced 791 of the last 1,000 reported Zcash blocks so roughly 79%. While this does not mean those pools own all that hardware, many individual miners point their machines at pools because solo mining is extremely unpredictable. A solo miner might wait a long time to find a block, but if you mine through a pool, you get paid more regularly based on how much work you contributed. The tradeoff is that miners often give up more than just payout handling. The pool builds the candidate block: it chooses which valid transactions are included, what order they appear in, and what policy the miner is working under. This is the problem Stratum V2 is trying to fix. Sovright documents two main modes: - Coinbase Only: In mining, “coinbase transaction” is the special transaction in every block that creates the block reward and pays it out. In this mode, miners can customize payout details, but the pool still chooses the transaction list. - Full Template: the miner runs their own Zebra node and builds the candidate block themselves. They choose which valid transactions to include, how to order them, and what fee/inclusion policy to use. The pool can still reject invalid work, but it no longer has to be the one deciding what goes into the block. Also I'm not not affiliated in anyway, just sharing something I found interesting.