AntPool, a crypto mining pool, has announced that it will not manage Ethereum accounts after the Merge. As such, it has asked customers for their private ETH addresses. AntPool attributed its decision to the sake of clients’ asset security. The firm will not be able to maintain the user’s ETH assets on the PoS chain.
However, AntPool will provide Ethash mining pool services for users who plan to keep mining Ethash tokens such as ETC. It will ensure hash power stability and asset security. AntPool, as part of the largest PoW mining pools in the world, believes in decentralized PoW consensus by Satoshi Nakamoto. It fully supports Bitcoin, ETC, and other PoW tokens. AntPool says the Merge, that is, ETH 2.0 comes with the risk of censorship among different countries. Concerns have been rift since the US OFAC placed sanctions on Tornado Cash. Moreover, analysts believe the blockchain network’s migration to the PoS consensus mechanism could make it vulnerable to censorship. Analysts say the government could coerce the centralized providers to censor transactions.
Users of the mining pool have until September 3 to provide an ETH wallet address to receive their ETH assets in the pool. AntPool is operated by Bitmain on Ethereum. Several people in the mining pool integrate processing power and computational resources to mine Ethereum. The official post highlighted that AntPool has always devoted itself to the development and maintenance of the PoW ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Brian Armstrong the CEO of Coinbase says they would rather quit Ethereum staking to not censor the network’s transactions.
