Ethereum’s Second-Largest Mining Pool to Shut Dow on Sept 30 Amid China Regulatory Pressure

The second-largest ETH mining pool – Sparkpool – has announced that it has halted access to new users in Mainland China. Furthermore, the organization plans to abandon all of its services as of September 30th.

• Based in Hangzhou, China, Sparkpool is the second-largest Ethereum mining pool responsible for more than 20% of the total hash rate, as the picture below demonstrates.

Ethereum Hash Rate Distribution. Source: Etherscan

• However, the company plans to seize all operations due to the most recent Chinese crackdown. The announcement published earlier this week reads that it has suspended access to new users who are located in Mainland China as of September 24th.
• This part might be expected to a large extent because of the nation’s openly hostile stance against the cryptocurrency industry. The latest news coming from the country indicated that all digital asset trading is banned.
• This forced Huobi, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, to stop providing any of its services to Chinese users.
• However, Sparkpool has decided to take it a step further. The statement reads that a “complete shutdown for all Sparkpool services and operations for the existing users, at home or abroad, has been planned for September 30th, 2021 (UTC +8) at 20:00.”
• The company argued that this decision comes “under the premise of ensuring the safety of our users’ assets.”
• Sparkpool promised to provide more specific information on clearing and refunding rules in upcoming announcements through emails and in-site letters.
• The closure of the second-largest ETH mining pool would most likely lead to damages to Ethereum’s hash rate. The metric, which is crucial for the network’s security, recently reached a new ATH, but it might drop in the following few weeks.