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Reward Verification Moves to Testnet
P2Pool V2 is building a decentralized crypto mining protocol in which several participating nodes, rather than a single pool operator's server, verify a miner's submitted work and compute its rewards. The Proof of Work verification layer, share accounting and direct payout through the block reward transaction are already running on testnet, according to the project's official site, while share trading for smaller miners is still being written. The team states it intends to test the system thoroughly on testnet before any mainnet launch. The move arrives at a moment when pool concentration is a live concern: when an SBI-affiliated mining pool suspended service, the three largest pools together held 60% of the network's hashrate. The work also lands as Bitcoin ($BTC) price action stays quiet through the weekend and mining centralization returns to the technical debate. P2Pool V2's technical documentation is explicit about where the current stack falls short. Stratum V2 and DATUM widen block-construction choice, letting miners pick which transactions go into a block, yet share calculation and payout distribution still sit on the pool operator's server. That residual centralization is what the new share chain is designed to remove: verification of each miner's work, the accounting behind it and the payment itself become functions the participating nodes perform collectively. In practice, the testnet deployment covers the accounting chain and the block reward transaction that pays miners directly from found blocks, the two capabilities a traditional pool keeps under its own control. What is not running yet is the retail side, the part that would let small miners trade accumulated shares instead of waiting for direct payouts, and the project frames that gap as sequencing, with share-market features next in line once the core verification loop proves itself.
Solving the Original P2Pool's Scale Limits
A mining pool aggregates many miners' computing power to find blocks and splits the reward among them, which is exactly the accounting layer where centralization concentrates. The original P2Pool pioneered node-verified mining but hit scale limits its developers now describe candidly. As the pool grew, shares that failed to make it onto the main share chain accumulated, and the hashrate information shown to miners became inaccurate. The block reward transaction also capped how many payout recipients it could carry, which constrained how many miners could be paid directly from a single found block. P2Pool V2 attacks both problems by design. Each miner gets an individually adjusted share submission difficulty, and shares that arrive late, or nearly simultaneously with another submission and end up orphaned off the share chain, are still counted in the reward calculation rather than discarded. The payout architecture is split by size. Miners whose accumulated work share is large enough receive payment directly inside the block reward transaction. Everyone else sells their share-chain output to market makers, effectively a liquidity pool for share sales, and receives Bitcoin ($BTC) in return. That mechanism matters more as each Bitcoin halving cuts the per-block subsidy and squeezes the margins small miners live on. Still under development are the features that would complete the market: routine share trading, atomic swaps using the Lightning network and Ark, and a dedicated share wallet for holding and moving mining positions. The project treats the full testnet cycle as a precondition for mainnet, and no activation date has been announced.
