Ckpool Tests Stratum V2, but Warns It’s Not Suitable for Solo Bitcoin Mining

• Ckpool runs Stratum V2 in parallel with V1 on Solo CK without affecting its stability.
• The job declaration of Stratum V2 still does not provide advantages in solo mining pools.

With Kolivas, the developer of CKPool, an experiment was activated with the Stratum V2 (SV2) protocol on Solo CKPool, one of the most used solo bitcoin (BTC) mining pools. The goal, as explained, is to measure how much interest there really is among miners to adopt this protocol.

The experiment enabled two separate ports: one with standard support for SV2 and another that also incorporates the job declaration function (job declaration or JD), which allows miners to build their own blocks and transaction templates. Both versions run in parallel with Stratum V1 on the same infrastructure, without compromising stability, and their statistics have already been incorporated into the general panel at stats.ckpool.org.

Kolivas reported that the SV2-supported pool operates with a hash rate close to 300 TH/s, provided by six users and ten workers, including his own test hash rate. According to the developer, everything works smoothly.

Regarding performance, Kolivas specified that his tests show that the end-to-end latency of native SV2 is practically identical to that of Stratum V1, with advantages in security, privacy, and a marginal reduction in bandwidth usage. He added that, after testing a Stratum V1 to V2 proxy, he also found no significant increase in latency, although he acknowledged that this configuration is still not straightforward for the end user.

Stratum V2 is an update to the protocol that Bitcoin miners use to communicate with mining pools, incorporating end-to-end encryption, greater privacy, and protection against man-in-the-middle attacks. Among its functions is the job declaration (job declaration), a mechanism that allows the miner to build their own block templates and choose which transactions to include, instead of relying on the templates provided by the pool.

Kolivas argues that the job declaration ---the feature that generates the most interest around SV2--- only provides a significant benefit in shared pools, not in solo mining pools like CKPool. The reason, as he explained, is that this function adds latency that the pool cannot avoid, as the protocol forces clients to reject templates coming from the pool itself.

The developer added that, in practice, a miner who already declares their own jobs has everything needed to mine solo locally, so using SV2 with this function in a pool only represents additional work and a greater risk of producing orphan blocks, without a real advantage beyond using their own templates.

Kolivas described the job declaration as a contribution to decentralization that carries a moderate latency disadvantage, more complex to set up than a basic V1 to V2 proxy. The developer hopes that highlighting this limitation will help others focus efforts on reducing or eliminating it, and as a possible technical solution, he proposed that pools send work in job declaration mode as soon as the tip of the chain is updated, allowing the client to decide whether to use it or wait for their update, without the pool being able to overwrite the client's work.

CKPool is one of the most well-known solo bitcoin mining pools. Unlike traditional pools, where the hash rate of all users is combined to compete as a single entity, in CKPool each miner competes individually using the shared infrastructure of the pool. Whoever finds a block keeps the full reward, minus the service fee.

Kolivas is the lead developer of ckpool, the software that supports CKPool, so his technical assessment of the implementation of SV2 comes from someone who directly built the experimental code of the protocol for the platform. Currently, CKPool has a computing power close to 205 PH/s provided by its users, according to the pool's public data.

Kolivas emphasized that Stratum V2 faces a cross-adoption problem: mining hardware does not incorporate native support for the protocol because pools do not offer it, and pools do not implement it permanently because hardware does not yet widely support it.

The developer confirmed that he is working on extending ckproxy, a tool that will convert Stratum V1 traffic to V2, and that the ckpool code for SV2 will be made public once it reaches a stable version. He noted that the company Braiins already offers hash rate rental with native support for SV2, a feature he plans to incorporate soon into CKPool on the higher difficulty ports. Kolivas will continue to monitor the level of adoption before deciding whether to integrate SV2 permanently into the entire infrastructure of the pool.

For Kolivas, the result of the experiment does not change the central point of his argument: as long as job declaration continues to add latency without a real counterpart in solo mining pools, its adoption will depend on the protocol developers themselves resolving that disadvantage, and not on miners accepting it just on principle.

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