China’s intervention in the cryptocurrency industry is claiming another victim – this time the ETH Sparkpool mining pool.
The second largest mining pool is closing
Sparkpool announced that it has stopped access to new users from mainland China. In addition, the organization plans to end all its services from September 30.
As we can see in the picture below, Sparkpool, based in Hangzhou, China, is the second largest mining pool, accounting for more than 20% of Ethereum’s total hashrate.
However, Pool plans to halt all operations due to the latest Chinese intervention. An announcement released on Monday says it has suspended access for new users in China since September 24. This step can be expected to a large extent due to the country’s openly hostile attitude towards the cryptocurrency industry.
According to recent regulations, all trading in digital assets is prohibited. This forced Huobi, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, to stop providing any of its services to Chinese users. However, Sparkpool decided to go one step further.
The statement states that “the complete shutdown of all Sparkpool services and operations for existing users, at home or abroad, was scheduled for 20:00 on 30 September 2021 (UTC +8)”. Pool argues that this decision is “to ensure the safety of our users’ resources.”
Sparkpool has promised to provide more specific information on billing and refund policies in the upcoming announcements via emails and posts on the web.
The closure of the second largest ETH mining pool will most likely lead to damage to the Ethereum hashrate. The metric, which is key to network security, has recently reached the new ATH, but is likely to decline in the coming weeks.
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