One of the largest Bitcoin mining pools, f2pool, has started blocking transactions from sanctioned wallets.

According to journalist Colin Wu's research, f2pool failed to confirm several blocks containing transactions from wallets hit by the US regulator's sanctions, despite the fact that transaction fees on them were higher than usual.

Following this, f2pool's co-founder announced on social network X (formerly Twitter) that the mining pool had disabled the transaction filtering feature until a consensus was reached in the community about the situation.

Bitcoin mining is an energy-intensive process in which miners use specialized devices to verify transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain and are rewarded with new coins. Currently, miners receive 6.25 BTC (equivalent to $226,000 at current exchange rates) for each block of transactions added to the blockchain.

The pool pools the computing power of many miners and distributes the reward for each transaction block added in proportion to their computing power. At the same time, the pool software has the technical ability to exclude certain transactions from blocks. In this case, f2pool intentionally did not include transactions from wallets that were sanctioned in the blocks, thus preventing their completion.

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According to the Mempool.space service, f2pool, a China-based company, ranks third among mining pools in terms of the number of blocks mined on the Bitcoin network. The company validated 7,353 blocks over the past year, representing 13.7% of the total volume over that period.

Unlike f2pool, Foundry USA and AntPool, the two largest mining pools, require all of their customers to undergo a Know Your Customer (KYC) process.