The second-largest Ethereum mining pool, Sparkpool, will be shutting down its operations completely. The reason behind this suspension is the ongoing crackdown on crypto by the Chinese government.
They have made an official announcement stating that they have already suspended new users’ access in mainland China after Chinese authorities initiated new measures for combating crypto adoption in their country. After the initial restrictions were made, Sparkpool continued shutting down its services. They are planning to suspend their entire mining pool in China as well as abroad.
As per the announcement that was made, the shutdown measures are being taken to ensure that the user’s assets are safe from the regulatory policy requirements. They will be sending more information about the shutdown through announcements, in-site messages, and emails.
This news of shutdown comes amid the actions taken by the Chinese government to reinforce their negative stance on cryptocurrency. They have declared all the crypto transactions in the country to be illegal. Following this, some of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, such as Huobi and Binance, have suspended any new account registrations from China. However, they are still servicing users from Hong Kong.
SparkPool was launched in early 2018 in China. Since then, it has managed to become one of the largest mining pools in the world for mining Ether (ETH). Before the shutdown, SparkPool’s mining power was responsible for 22% of the global hash rate of Ethereum. This was slightly lower than 24% of Ethermine’s share. At the same time, Ethereum will continue to switch to a proof-of-stake model from its current proof-of-work consensus mechanism.
