Bitcoin Forum

Sparkpool, the second-largest Ethereum mining pool in the world, is suspending operations due to the ongoing Chinese crackdown on crypto.

The mining pool officially announced that it has suspended access to new users in mainland China on Monday in response to Chinese authorities initiating new measures to combat crypto adoption in the country.

Following the initial restrictions made last Friday, Sparkpool will continue shutting down services, and plans to suspend existing mining pool users both in China and abroad on Thursday.

According to the announcement, the measures intend to ensure safety of users’ assets in response to “regulatory policy requirements.” “Further details about the shutdown will be sent out through announcements, emails, and in-site messages,” Sparkpool noted.

Launched in China in early 2018, SparkPool has emerged as one of the world’s largest mining pools for mining Ether (ETH), alongside the world’s largest Ethereum mining pool Ethermine. At the time of writing, SparkPool’s mining power makes up 22% of Ethereum’s global hash rate, slightly lower than Ethermine’s share of 24%, according to Poolwatch.io.

The news comes amid the Chinese government reinforcing its negative stance on crypto by declaring all crypto-related transactions illegal in the country last Friday. Some of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Huobi have subsequently suspended new account registrations from mainland China, albeit reportedly still servicing users in Hong Kong.

SparkPool did not immediately respond to AEX’s request for comment.

SparkPool’s shutdown comes as Ethereum continues its switch from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake model in 2022 — part of the long-planned upgrade known as Ethereum 2.0. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Ether miners will not have many choices after Ethereum 2.0 finally arrives, as their mining equipment is set to become obsolete.


Now, ETH trading is very popular on the AEX exchange (www.aex. com).

ETH is successfully trading on every exchange. :P :P

They just suspended but definitely, they will move to another place in future and starts to mine other coins and ethereum as much as possible.

Won't take long for the location to move or for miners to just connect to another pool. Just part of the shell game to move around the locations to avoid getting into any trouble from the China crypto ban. May have a short-term hash rate fluctuation when the pool finally shuts down for good but overall likely to have little to no impact unless China really starts going after physical hardware.

Spark was banning chinese people to use its service and nothing to be worried about. It was only suspending all of its operations in china. It's still suspending its service didn't mean if it will be stopping forever.
Wow it's very popular,  :P The trading volume was so high less than 50 millions USD. I thought that you're wanna discussing about sparkpool but just your another shilling thread for aex, right? Ethereum trading was very popular on binance. Aex was nothing https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/aex/
Can't aex make its own announcement thread rather than doing the trick like what already done by so many shittokens?

That’s right, they really have to move into other location to continue their operations since they are losing money here and they can’t stick to that. I just see this one to affect the transactions speed on ETH network and this might also trigger the fees which is already expensive to transact. Anyway, this is just temporary and China will lift that again.

+1, short term problem only, there are still some adjustment that needed here.
What I find good news here, it will help the miner to be more located in different part of the world, it will help the hash power will spread and not by owning a huge percentage of hash power by only 1 country.
And I believe this china crackdown to cryptocurrency is just temporary, there are still lot of possibility that China will welcome with open arms again the cryptocurrency.

I doubt though that the Chinese will reverse their policy on banning everything related to crypto. That's how their government is, and what will be the main reason if they made a sudden U-turn?

In any case, the most that will be affected are the miners obviously, however, I do believed that the Chinese miners have plan B in set. I mean they have been in this business for so long and have heard their government anti-crypto stance. And as a wise business, owners should have taken this into account that one day the government will suspend it and that day has finally arrived. Maybe they will switch to other country or location that is more crypto friendly.

Earlier this happen with bitcoin blockchain too but sooner the congestion will be clear once there is clear announcement from the pools but surely they are not going to shut it down completely or else they have to face huge financial loss.

I do not think that if some Chinese mining pools and exchanges suspend their operations, the diffusion of eth will suffer any decline, competition in this sector is a lot and i am sure that there are already some companies from other countries ready to take the place of the Chinese ones that will stop operating