Impending Closure Of Monero Largest Mining Pool Sparks Decentralization Debate

Monero is the most popular privacy token in the space, and investors have flocked to it due to the anonymity it provides. Its community is widespread with a lot of miners, but one mining pool has dominated the hashrate of the privacy coin in the past. Minexmr, which is the largest mining pool, has, however, announced that it will be shutting down operations, triggering various debates in the space.

Monero Largest Mining Pool Shuts Down

Over the weekend, Minexmr announced that it will be shutting down operations permanently. The pool sees a total hashrate of 1.05 Gh/s as per data from the website, making it the largest Monero mining pool, controlling 42% of the entire network hashrate. 

In the announcement, the team offered no explanation for why it was shutting down, but speculations are it is linked to the crackdown on privacy coins by governments. They instead offered alternatives such as the decentralized p2pool for miners who wished to continue.

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Basically, Monero miners on the Minexmr pool have less than two weeks to move their operations to another pool. The post explained that all miners that were not updated by August 12th will stop working. As for rewards, they will be disbursed after the shutdown on August 12th.

XMR price trending at $158 | Source: XMRUSD on TradingView.com

Community Reacts To The News

The growth of the Minexmr mining pool had previously concerned Monero users who are big on decentralization. When the hashrate controlled by the pool crossed 40%, the concerns became more vocal as the community worried about what such concentration would mean for decentralization.

There have been calls for there to be more distribution of the mining hashrate to other pools such as p2pool, and it looks like the prayers of those users have been answered. With a more distributed mining hashrate, decentralization is easier to achieve as a single pool cannot affect the whole network.

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However, not everyone has been rejoicing over the shutdown of the Minexmr mining pool. Some have expressed sadness over the shutdown as Minexmr is the longest-running Monero pool in the space. The next obvious choice for miners will now be p2pool, which makes up only 3% of the mining hashrate.

The news has not had any negative impact on the price of XMR whatsoever. At the time of writing, the coin is up 8.09% in the last 7 days and is currently trading at $158.

Featured image from Investopedia, chart from TradingView.com

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