Stratum URLs by region.
The fastest path from "I have a GPU or ASIC" to "shares are landing" on the testnet demo. Five steps.
01 The endpoint shape
Every pool the stack runs speaks the Stratum protocol over plain TCP. A miner connects to a single endpoint with this shape:
The host is whatever DNS name you stand the pool up behind, and the port is the listener you configured the pool engine to bind. The protocol also supports Stratum v2, which adds an encrypted, binary transport — most modern miners negotiate it automatically and fall back to v1 if the pool only offers the older protocol.
02 Regions are an operator choice
There is no fixed list of regional URLs baked into the software. As the operator you decide how many pool instances to run and where to put them — the usual reason to run more than one is to place a listener physically close to your miners so round-trip latency on share submission stays low. A common example layout looks like this:
Those hostnames are illustrative. The one pool running live on this stack today is the GCC (Scrypt) testnet pool — a single demo listener you can point a Scrypt miner at to watch shares accepted and a block settled. Its coins are testnet only, with no monetary value.
03 Username, worker and password
The pool is non-custodial: it never holds funds, so there is no account to register. The miner’s username is the wallet address that should receive the testnet coin units, with an optional .worker suffix to label the machine. The password field is unused — send any placeholder, conventionally x.