What is a Stratum Proxy and what are the benefits?

A stratum proxy aggregates share data from individual workers/miners within a mining datacenter and sends them to the mining pool on behalf of the mining machines.

Stratum Proxy

Some datacenter operators choose to operate stratum proxies on premises. A stratum proxy aggregates share data from individual miners within a mining datacenter and sends them to the mining pool on behalf of the mining machines.

The primary benefits are fewer active connections, resulting in better network performance with suboptimal internet uplinks, and less anomalous network traffic which reduces the likelihood of being shutdown by ISPs. Possible downsides to a datacenter operator are that the additional network hop introduces a small degree of latency which slightly increases the possibility of stale shares on a robust internet connection and additional infrastructural complexity with a single point of failure.

For mining partners who express interest, Foundry offers a reference implementation of a stratum proxy for operators to implement within their own infrastructure. However, we do not provide direct support for these solutions.