A Milestone for Miner Autonomy
Digital mining firm Gomining revealed Thursday, June 25, that it successfully mined the first known live Bitcoin block utilizing the Stratum V2 protocol. The block was produced in a live production environment using the DMND bitcoin mining pool. The achievement demonstrates a functional blueprint for miner-controlled block creation, a structural shift away from the centralized transaction selection models that have long dominated the cryptocurrency mining sector.
For more than a decade, mining pools have held primary control over which transactions are included in Bitcoin blocks. Gomining bypassed this dynamic by leveraging Stratum V2’s job declaration functionality via the DMND pool, according to a media statement. This allowed the company to locally construct and declare its own block template rather than relying on a pool operator to select transactions.
“This block demonstrates that miners can now participate in pooled mining while retaining control over block construction,” said Mark Zalan, CEO of Gomining. “By creating our own block template and including GoBTC Pay transactions, we’re demonstrating one of the practical capabilities that Stratum V2 makes possible.”
The newly mined block included transactions processed through GoBTC Pay, an open-source, instant payment protocol designed by Gomining that settles transactions purely in native bitcoin. The successful deployment comes amid an aggressive push by Gomining to expand non-custodial utility across the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Alongside its protocol-level infrastructure advancements, Gomining recently announced an integration with Babylon to utilize its Trustless Bitcoin Vault system. Under the Babylon integration, asset holders will be able to lock up to 1,000 bitcoins into native, self-custodial onchain vaults. Users can programmatically commit those locked funds directly to Gomining’s industrial operations to earn native mining yields, eliminating the historical need to bridge assets to secondary blockchains or rely on centralized third-party custodians.
Stratum V2 is an open-source mining protocol developed with broad, industry-wide contributor backing. Beyond security enhancements and reduced data latencies, its primary structural objective is the redistribution of transaction-selection authority back to independent miners, reinforcing the censorship resistance of the underlying network.
“A miner just mined the first Stratum V2 block to power their own product end to end,” said Alejandro De La Torre, CEO and co-founder of DMND. “GoMining declared the template and included their GoBTC Pay payments with no pool in the way. We built DMND for exactly this.”
Industry advocates anticipate that the production milestone will catalyze wider adoption of Stratum V2 across the global mining infrastructure layout.
