The paper introduced background and development status of IPv6, expounded development tendency and research direction of application of IPv6 in industrial Ethernet, and indicated all hardware and software based on mine industrial Ethernet should have dual protocol stack, and with maturity and popularization of the IPv6 technology, coal mine network equipment that only supports IPv6 protocol will be developed, such as explosion-proof network equipments, configuration softwares, drivers of data acquisition and control hardware which support IPv6.