Bitcoin's transaction-censorship problem just lost one of its best arguments for being unsolvable.
Key takeaways
DMND mining pool and GoMining mined block 955,318 on June 25, 2026, using Stratum V2's Job Declaration feature, the first known time the mechanism has functioned in a live production environment, according to a company note first reported by Bitcoin Magazine. GoMining selected its own transactions, built its own block template, submitted it to DMND for validation, and put it on chain, no pool operator touched the transaction selection.
That is not a minor implementation detail. Under Stratum V1, the protocol that has governed pooled mining since 2012, miners hand their hashpower to a pool and receive back whatever block template the pool assembles. The pool decides what goes in the block. Job Declaration, a sub-protocol within Stratum V2, breaks that arrangement: the miner proposes the template, the pool validates it, and the miner's version goes forward.
GoMining used Job Declaration to include transactions from GoBTC Pay, an open-source, non-custodial Bitcoin instant payments protocol the company announced at Consensus Miami in May 2026. The block is the first known case of a miner using the mechanism to power its own product, end to end, with no intermediary making the call on which transactions made it.
"A miner just mined the first Stratum V2 block to power their own product end to end," said Alejandro De La Torre, CEO and co-founder of DMND. "GoMining declared the template and included their GoBTC Pay payments with no pool in the way. We built DMND for exactly this."
GoMining CEO Mark Zalan was direct about the structural stakes: "For years, mining pools have determined which transactions are included in Bitcoin blocks. By being the first to declare our own block template and include GoBTC Pay transactions, we're demonstrating one of the practical capabilities that Stratum V2 makes possible."
DMND launched in March 2025 as the first pool built entirely on the Stratum V2 and SRI codebase, with its seed round led by Trammell Venture Partners. GoMining, which according to the company serves five million users and ranks among the top-ten Bitcoin miners by hashrate, operates data centers in the U.S. and internationally and offers tokenized hashrate products alongside payments tools.
Pool-level transaction censorship has been a legitimate concern for years, and not a theoretical one. OFAC-compliant filtering by some pools has been documented. The mechanism is straightforward under Stratum V1: a government subpoena, a compliance directive, or a pool operator's own political calculus can blacklist transactions before they reach a block. Miners contributing hashpower to those pools have no say.
Job Declaration severs that link at the protocol layer. The miner selects transactions before the template ever reaches the pool. The pool confirms the block is valid Bitcoin, but it does not pick the contents.
The Working Group context makes this production milestone harder to dismiss. Seven major pools, including Antpool, F2Pool, Foundry, SpiderPool, MARA Foundation, Block Inc., and DMND, joined the Stratum V2 Working Group on May 7, 2026. As of May 2026, roughly five pools control approximately 70% of global hashpower under Stratum V1. The protocol is now proven in production. The remaining question is whether the largest pools activate Job Declaration specifically, or adopt V2's other improvements (encryption, efficiency) while leaving transaction selection exactly where it is.
This is the mining equivalent of running your own node. The option to participate without delegating the most consequential decision to an intermediary now has a working demonstration. For context on how sovereign bitcoin mining intersects with energy and policy choices, the stakes compound quickly.
The falsifiable thesis: if no other top-hashrate miners adopt Job Declaration within 12 months, or if Working Group pools activate V2 but disable Job Declaration, this stays a proof of concept. The trigger to watch is Foundry USA. As the largest single pool by hashrate, Foundry shipping Job Declaration support on any stated timeline would signal a genuine industry shift. Silence would signal the opposite.
The Stratum V2 Working Group now has a production proof it did not have a month ago. The pressure lands squarely on Foundry, Antpool, and F2Pool to either activate Job Declaration or explain publicly why they won't. Any pool that adopts V2 base connectivity but leaves Job Declaration disabled is making a deliberate choice to retain control over transaction selection. That choice will become harder to obscure as the protocol matures and miner awareness grows. Watch for Working Group meeting outputs and any public commitments on Job Declaration timelines from the three largest pools by hashrate.
Stratum V2 covers several improvements over the original protocol: encrypted connections, better efficiency, and decentralization tools. Job Declaration is the specific sub-protocol that lets an individual miner submit its own proposed block template to the pool instead of accepting the pool's. Without Job Declaration active, even a full Stratum V2 connection leaves transaction selection in the pool's hands. Block 955,318 is notable because Job Declaration was live and functional in production, not just the base V2 connection.
With Job Declaration active, yes in principle. The miner selects transactions before submitting the template; the pool validates that the block is structurally valid Bitcoin but does not control the contents. Whether this meaningfully defeats OFAC-style filtering at scale depends on how many miners adopt it. A single miner-pool pair proves the mechanism works. Broad adoption across high-hashrate miners would make systematic transaction filtering structurally untenable.
GoMining offers tokenized hashrate products, meaning retail participants buy exposure to mining revenue without running hardware. That is a separate layer from the hardware-level protocol. The Job Declaration milestone is about the industrial miners running ASICs: those machines controlled the block template. Whether the tokenized-hashrate wrapper introduces its own custody or trust assumptions is a legitimate and separate question, but it does not undermine what happened at the protocol layer on June 25.
