How StratumRace Started

I originally started looking at mining.notify timing for two reasons. First, I genuinely wanted to know how pools stacked up from my home setup. Second, I often get asked by new folks, “What’s the best pool?” My typical response was something like, “Choose something that’s fast from your vantage point, has an operator you trust, and offers a feature set that matters to you.”

🤔 The Problem With Simple Answers

But I kept seeing other people say, “Pick the one with the lowest ping,” or “The best pool is your own.” I wanted a data-backed way to show that these answers, while genuine, are misguided. Ping alone does not tell you how quickly a pool delivers new work, and an untuned appliance node you purchased or a cookie-cutter container node installed through a GUI with default settings is not always faster than a well-tuned solo pool. I wanted a better way to measure actual notification timing and help educate people about the difference.

🏁 str_race.py

That is how str_race.py was born.

I started doing a lot of testing against well-known pools and home setups. Around the same time, Matt from AtlasPool was working on tuning his pool’s global node setup. Much of our work overlapped, so we started bouncing ideas off each other, improving our testing methods, and using the results for tuning.

🧪 From a Script to a Project

What started as a quick script turned into several nights a week on video chat coding, testing, and joking around. It has been one of the most fun projects I have worked on in quite a while.

I open-sourced the tool on GitHub, and almost immediately Marshall Long took it a step further by implementing a web frontend and adding several new features. Bouncing ideas back and forth with Marshall really moved the project to the next level.

🛠️ Rebuilding It From the Ground Up

That is when Matt and I decided to come together and rewrite the entire thing from the ground up, taking everything we had both learned over the previous month and incorporating it into the new version.

🌎 StratumRace

The result is StratumRace, a real-time leaderboard that measures how quickly Bitcoin mining pools deliver new block templates to miners from multiple geographic vantage points.

⛏️ What Comes Next

We still have plenty of new features in mind, and we hope to continue pushing updates as time permits. As always, any and all feedback is welcome.

I am glad we were able to use this project to drive real conversation around timing and latency in the solo mining community.

Posted: 2026-07-19