Largest Monero mining pool is shutting down

The largest Monero mining pool by hashrate MINEXMR has revealed it will stop operations on August 12th. The news today comes months after the mining pool was bashed for controlling a significant percentage of all mining hashrate on the privacy token blockchain. 

MINEXMR Monero mining pool closes

During the time of writing, MINEXMR had a total hashrate of 1.06 Gh/s, which accounts for roughly 42% of the Monero network hashrate – 2.51 Gh/s, according to miningpoolstats. Also, the number of active miners in the pool was around 9,399. 

MINEXMR didn’t specify any particular reason for its decision to close the largest Monero mining pool. It said all miners using the pool should reconfigure their mining rigs to a different pool, precisely p2pool, before August 12th. It added that pending rewards after the closure would be sent automatically. 

We recommend transitioning to the decentralised p2pool. There are no pool fees when using p2pool and the decentralised pool helps to support the Monero network.

MINEXMR. 

p2pool is the seventh-largest Monero mining pool. It holds only 79.49 MH/s hashrate at press time. 

A win for Monero?

The Monero community seems to dislike the fact that MINEXMR controlled a significant portion of the overall network hashrate. In February, they bashed the MINEXMR operators for controlling about 44% of the network hashrate at that time, urging miners to leave the pool for the sake of decentralization.

As MINEXMR closes, the concentration of the hashrate is likely to spread among other mining pools. There’s also a possibility that hashrate could flock to a single pool, which could persist the centralization threat.

XMR is currently trading at $156.48, a 0.34% and 7.27% increase on the daily and weekly timeframe, respectively.