On DMND, Miners Now Control Their Own Rootstock Merge Mining — and the rBTC Rewards Go Directly to Them

LONDON & BUENOS AIRES — May 15, 2026 — DMND and RootstockLabs today announced that miners on DMND can construct their own Bitcoin block templates, choose the Rootstock merged-mining commitment, and receive rBTC rewards directly to their own address. Both the merge-mining decision and reward sit with the miner, not the pool. The capability runs on Stratum V2 Job Declaration via DMND pool.

For more than a decade, pools have built the templates and collected the merge-mining rewards. Miners contributed hashrate to decisions they did not make and to revenue they did not see.

How miners receive rBTC

DMND is the first pool to combine templates built by the miner with direct rBTC rewards from merge mining. Miners who build their own template and include the Rootstock commitment receive rBTC straight to their address, with no pool intermediary and no revenue share.

Why this matters for decentralization

For Bitcoin, pool-controlled templates concentrate transaction selection in a handful of operators, a well-documented centralization vector. For Rootstock, the problem compounds: a sidechain secured by merge mining inherits whatever centralization exists in the merge-mining layer above it. Returning both template construction and merge-mining rewards to the miners doing the actual work decentralizes the two chains at the same point in the stack.

With rBTC being pegged 1:1 to Bitcoin and a growing Bitcoin-native DeFi ecosystem with over 200 dApps this joint development of Stratum V2 and rBTC merge mining strengthens incentive alignment and unlocks new growth across Bitcoin layers.. This connects Bitcoin’s security directly to a growing on-chain economy, giving miners exposure to additional fee flows beyond the base layer.

What is a Bitcoin sidechain?

A Bitcoin sidechain is an independent, parallel blockchain that uses BTC as the core asset and is cryptographically and economically connected to the main Bitcoin network. The concept was first introduced by Blockstream in 2015. Rootstock was the first sidechain to go live in 2018. It was created by a group of Argentinian cypherpunks and bitcoiners motivated to extend Bitcoin’s capabilities so it could serve those that needed it most.

Rootstock is now secured by a majority of Bitcoin’s hash power through merge mining and supports a growing ecosystem of over 200 applications spanning decentralized finance, infrastructure, and payments with BTC as the network’s core asset. Today bitcoiners, builders and institutions are using Rootstock to put the hardest money on earth to work, from BTC collateralized lending and stablecoins to emerging onchain capital markets.

Quotes

"The miner controls the merge mining and the miner gets paid for the merge mining. More delegation of control to miners is our key support for further decentralisation of the Bitcoin ecosystem." — Alejandro De La Torre, CEO and Co-Founder, DMND

"This latest news is a critical move towards increasing decentralization across both Bitcoin and Rootstock, ensuring that the miners who secure the network can also participate more directly in decision-making and rewards. DMND’s implementation of Stratum V2 is an important evolution in mining infrastructure that expands what’s possible for miners and brings us one step closer to making Bitcoin work for everyone." — Adrian Eidelman, Co-Founder of RootstockLabs.

About DMND

Stratum V2-first Bitcoin mining pool. Built around miner sovereignty. Dmnd.work

About RootstockLabs

RootstockLabs is a core contributor to Rootstock, the longest-running Bitcoin-secured financial services layer and one of the earliest teams to extend Bitcoin with Turing-complete smart contracts. Its founding team includes early Bitcoin pioneers, responsible for starting the first Bitcoin communities in Latin America and conducting the earliest security audits in both the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.

Live since 2018 with 100% uptime, Rootstock combines Bitcoin’s proof-of-work security with EVM-compatible programmability. The network is secured by a majority of Bitcoin’s hash power and supports a growing ecosystem of over 200 applications spanning decentralized finance, infrastructure, and payments. Rootstock’s native token, rBTC, is pegged 1:1 to Bitcoin and powers the network’s economy.

Today bitcoiners, builders and institutions are using Rootstock to put the hardest money on earth to work, from BTC collaterised lending and stablecoins to emerging onchain capital markets. Rootstock takes Bitcoin beyond a public global payment network and turns it into the foundation for a freer and fairer global financial system. Learn more rootstock.io and rootstocklabs.com