I'm planning to restart the pool within the next hour for pool and bitcoind updates to make it compatible with native segwit (bech32 addresses starting with bc1). As always, assuming all goes well there should be only minimal downtime.
Restart completed uneventfully. This pool now supports bech32 addresses. These are currently available on only electrum wallet by default, but the next version of bitcoin core due out, 0.16.0, will be able to natively support them. These are native segwit addresses that start with bc1 instead of 1x or 3x (eg bc1qw508d6qejxtdg4y5r3zarvary0c5xw7kv8f3t4), and the advantage of native segwit addresses is they take up less blockchain space making transactions that use them slightly smaller and thereby having a very slight decrease in transaction fee.
For more information, see:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0173.mediawiki