SBI Crypto to shut down mining pool that holds roughly 2% of Bitcoin’s hashrate

SBI Crypto has announced it will shut down its mining pool on July 31, ending a service tied to one of Japan’s largest financial groups and giving miners less than a month to redirect their hashrate.

The pool will stop accepting mining shares, which represent a miner’s contributions in the pool, on the cutoff date, according to SBI Crypto. Shares submitted after that cutoff will not be accepted, and the firm said the pool is expected to operate normally until the shutdown date.

The company urged customers to keep mining with the pool until the cutoff so eligible shares are included in the final payout calculation.

SBI Crypto’s mining pool, according to data from Hashrateindex, accounts for roughly 2% of the Bitcoin network’s total hashrate. The firm did not disclose a reason for the closure in its shutdown notice, and it did not provide current hashrate figures for the pool.

SBI Crypto operates under SBI Group, the Japanese financial conglomerate. The mining pool opened to the public in 2021, with SBI saying at the time that it would support the pool with roughly 1.1 EH/s of its own mining power.