What happened
DMND, the mining pool built around Stratum V2's job-negotiation features, and RootstockLabs, the team behind the Rootstock Bitcoin sidechain, said Thursday they are integrating Stratum V2 into Rootstock's merge-mining flow. The announcement was reported by Bitcoin Magazine in a piece authored by Shinobi. Under the integration, miners pointing hashrate at a DMND-compatible pool will be able to construct or select their own Rootstock block templates and submit those for merge-mining alongside their Bitcoin work.
That breaks from the current arrangement, where the pool operator alone decides which Rootstock transactions get included. The partnership covers protocol-level plumbing rather than a token or a fee change, and no economics shift for miners on day one. DMND said the deployment is live for participating miners; RootstockLabs framed it as a foundational change to how merge-mined chains interact with their proof-of-work parents.
Why it matters
Template centralization has been the unresolved scar of the 2024 mining debate. When Ocean launched its DATUM protocol that year and Foundry, MARA Pool, and Antpool collectively held over 70% of Bitcoin hashrate, the question of who actually chooses transactions, miners or pool operators, became politically loaded. Stratum V2 is the open-source answer most of the industry has gestured at.
It has been slow to deploy in production, and most existing rollouts cover only Bitcoin block templates. Extending it to merge-mining is non-trivial. Rootstock is merge-mined by a meaningful share of Bitcoin hashrate, with RootstockLabs historically citing figures north of 60% participation.