Electrum Protocol Specification

Stratum is a universal bitcoin communication protocol used mainly by bitcoin client Electrum and miners.

NOTE:

This document is outdated. For newer versions of the protocol than 0.10, see

Format

Stratum protocol is based on JSON-RPC 2.0 (although it doesn’t include “jsonrpc” information in every message). Each message has to end with a line end character (n).

Request

Typical request looks like this:

{ "id": 0, "method":"some.stratum.method", "params": [] }

• id begins at 0 and every message has its unique id number

• list and description of possible methods is below

• params is an array, e.g.: [ “1myfirstaddress”, “1mysecondaddress”, “1andonemoreaddress” ]

Response

Responses are similar:

{ "id": 0, "result": "616be06545e5dd7daec52338858b6674d29ee6234ff1d50120f060f79630543c"}

• id is copied from the request message (this way client can pair each response to one of his requests)

• result can be:

  • null

  • a string (as shown above)

  • a hash, e.g.:

    { "nonce": 1122273605, "timestamp": 1407651121, "version": 2, "bits": 406305378 }

  • an array of hashes, e.g.:

    [ { "tx_hash:
    "b87bc42725143f37558a0b41a664786d9e991ba89d43a53844ed7b3752545d4f",
    "height": 314847 }, { "tx_hash":
    "616be06545e5dd7daec52338858b6674d29ee6234ff1d50120f060f79630543c",
    "height": 314853 } ]

Methods