A group of Bitcoin mining pools that together control roughly 75% of the network's hashrate has signed on to a common open standard for how blocks get constructed, according to Coindesk reporting on May 11, 2026. The move targets one of the quieter levers of control in Bitcoin: which transactions end up in the next block, and who decides.
Block construction is the step where a mining pool, or a miner, assembles a candidate block from the mempool and ships it to the hashing hardware. Historically, pool operators have built those templates centrally and handed them down to the miners pointing hashpower at the pool. That setup is efficient, but it also means a small group of operators can influence what gets mined, even though the hashrate itself is spread across thousands of machines.
The control that hides behind the hashrate share
Bitcoin's decentralization is usually measured in hashrate distribution, but template construction has long sat upstream of that number. A pool with 20% of hashrate is not just one of five votes on what the chain looks like, it is one of five entities directly choosing which transactions ride in 20% of blocks. Regulators and transaction-screening services have leaned on that fact in the past, pressuring operators rather than miners.
An open standard pushes that decision back toward the individual miner. Instead of accepting a template handed down from the pool, miners running a compliant client can build their own block from the public mempool and only use the pool for payout coordination and variance smoothing.
A 75% threshold matters more than it sounds
Reaching three-quarters of network hashrate is the difference between a niche protocol upgrade and a default. Once the largest pools support a common standard, the cost of running miners on top of it drops sharply, and the holdouts have a harder time justifying a bespoke setup.
It also affects how plausibly anyone can argue that Bitcoin's base layer is filterable. A single pool can be served a subpoena or asked to drop certain transaction types. A network where 75% of hashrate accepts blocks built by the miners themselves is a much harder target. The transactions that show up on chain are decided by a wider and more globally distributed set of operators.
The 75% figure is as of May 11, 2026, and is reported by Coindesk based on disclosed participation from pool operators. Hashrate share moves week to week with hardware deployment and electricity prices, so the exact number will drift even if the alignment holds.
Two friction points to watch
Pool operators do not lose all their leverage. Payouts, variance smoothing, and customer support still run through them, and pools that build templates well, including extracting maximum fee revenue, can still offer that service to miners who want it. The standard is closer to an opt-out than a mandate: miners who want to delegate template construction can keep doing so, miners who want to build their own get a clean interface to do it.
Two areas of friction look likely. Fee revenue matters more in 2026 than it did a cycle ago, and template-building is now a meaningful optimization problem. Miners building their own blocks may capture slightly less fee revenue per block than a pool with a tuned template engine. Pool operators will need to decide whether to expose tools to help solo template builders or compete on template quality.
The second area is regulation. Sanctions and consumer-protection regimes were drafted assuming someone, somewhere, was choosing which transactions made it into a block. Pushing that decision to the miner, who may be physically distributed across dozens of jurisdictions, complicates any rulemaking that targets a central operator. Expect more scrutiny on pool payout mechanisms and on the open standard's reference implementation rather than on transaction selection itself.
The story is decentralization, not throughput
The change does not raise Bitcoin's block size, lower fees, or speed up confirmations. It does not directly affect anyone holding bitcoin via a self-custody wallet or spending it through a card. What it changes is who decides the order and content of the next block, and how widely that decision is spread.
For users who treat Bitcoin's censorship resistance as a real feature rather than a slogan, that is the meaningful headline. The threat model where a handful of pool operators are pressured into filtering specific addresses becomes harder to execute when three out of every four hashes on the network land in blocks the miner built themselves.
The same shift has been quietly underway in other parts of the stack. Treasury and reserve-style entities have grown alongside it. JPMorgan recently projected another $30B of bitcoin buying from one corporate buyer through 2026, and US government balances have grown by more than $4B since April, which makes the question of who controls inclusion in the next block less theoretical and more financially loaded.
Overview
Bitcoin mining pools representing about 75% of total network hashrate, as of May 11, 2026, are aligning on an open standard for block construction that lets individual miners build their own templates rather than relying on pool operators. The change is structural rather than user-facing: it widens the set of entities deciding which transactions get mined, hardens the base layer against pressure aimed at a few central operators, and shifts some fee-optimization work from pools to miners. Throughput, fees, and confirmation times are unchanged. The clearest impact is on censorship resistance, an attribute that becomes more economically relevant as institutional and government balances continue to scale.
