SBI Crypto is closing its Bitcoin mining pool after roughly five years, with miners told they can receive normal payouts until the cutoff.
SBI Crypto, the crypto mining business linked to Japan’s SBI Group, said on its Chinese-language website that it will shut down its Bitcoin mining pool on July 31, ending a service it opened to public miners in 2021.
Per the translated notice, SBI Mining Pool will stop accepting new mining powers in the pool at 7:00 am Japan time on Friday, July 31. After that cutoff, miners connected to the pool will no longer earn new rewards there and will need to move their machines to another mining pool, the announcement reads.
SBI Crypto said the pool is expected to continue operating normally until the shutdown date, with customers still able to mine and receive payouts as usual.
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Miners Told to Prepare Migration
It remains unclear why SBI Crypto decided to shut down the Bitcoin mining pool launched publicly in April 2021.
At launch, SBI said it had been self-mining Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV since 2017 and would support the pool with about 1.1 EH/s of its own mining power.
The pool, co-developed with another Bitcoin mining giant Northern Data AG, eventually became a real but still small player in Bitcoin mining, especially next to giants like Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool.
Data from Hashrate Index shows SBI Crypto has only about 20.9 EH/s, or roughly 2.2% of Bitcoin mining pool hashrate, while the biggest pools each controlled more than 20%. SBI didn’t say why it is shutting the pool down.
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