Antpool, the bitcoin mining pool affiliated with Bitmain, has announced the crypto mining operation will not manage ethereum accounts after The Merge is implemented. The mining pool is asking participating Antpool miners to add their ethereum withdrawal addresses by September 3, in order to receive the accumulated ether collected by Antpool.
Antpool will stop supporting Ethereum after the merge
On Saturday, August 27th, cryptocurrency mining pool Antpool told its customers that it would not retain the ETH asset following the merger. Customers have until September 3rd to provide an ETH address in order to collect the remaining Ether mined by Antpool’s Ethereum mining operation. Statistics show that the hashpower per second (TH/s) dedicated to the ETH blockchain is over 1,000 Terahashes and Antpool is the tenth largest ETH mining pool in terms of hashrate.
The largest ETH mining pool in terms of hashrate is Ethermine, a pool that commands 263 terahash of hashpower compared to Antpool’s 17.9 terahash. Ethermine also announced it would stop supporting ETH assets and would not mine a new PoW version of ETH. Antpool declared that The Merge comes with some censorship risk, and the pool will distribute the remaining ETH Antpool mined next month.
“As ETH 2.0 (The Merge) comes with the risk of censorship between different countries, Antpool will not be able to maintain user ETH assets on the PoS chain, in order to protect clients’ assets,” said mining pool operations Saturday. to widen. Antpool also noted that Poole advocates decentralized proof-of-work created by Satoshi Nakamoto and that it “fully supports BTC, ETC and other PoW tokens.”
Antpool added:
Antpool will continue providing Ethash mining pool services for users who plan to keep mining Ethash tokens like [Ethereum Classic], and will make every effort to ensure hash power stability and asset security.
The news follows Antpool’s announcement on July 26, when mining pool CEO LV Lei told Bitmain’s Mining Summit that the firm had invested $10 million to strengthen Ethereum Classic (ETC). ETC’s hash rate once again hit another all-time high at block height 15,817,701 on August 26, 2022, when it reached 39.58 Terahash per second (TH/s).
