Bitmain-owned mining giant AntPool has received a critical amount of money for its clients’ altcoin holdings.
AntPool will not keep its customers’ funds on this altcoin
After Ethereum moves to PoS in the coming months, AntPool, a Bitmain-owned mining giant, has announced that it will no longer hold its clients’ assets in Ethereum. The merger, which will take place in September, will switch Ethereum to the PoS consensus mechanism. Thus, the Ethereum network will no longer be secured by miners, but by validators.
An Ethereum mining pool called AntPool allows users to connect their computers and pool their computing power for reward mining. As a mining pool, Antpool then pays users mining rewards to their accounts. The business announced a strategy to engage customers ahead of the merger in a blog post on Saturday. The mining giant stated that customers cannot hold their assets on the Ethereum 2.0 network.
Company will not hold client assets on Ethereum after merge due to ‘censorship risk’
The company will stop protecting certain client assets after Ethereum’s PoS upgrade, mostly due to the “danger of censorship”. This decision is a result of growing concerns that transactions related to Tornado Cash may be censored by Ethereum validators under duress. According to the statements in Antpool’s blog post published during the day:
ANTPOOL will not be able to protect user’s ETH assets on PoS Blockchain as ETH 2.0 (The Merge) comes with the possibility of censorship between different countries.
Validators will process transactions on the network when Ethereum switches to PoS. However, few stakers largely dominate the validators. For example, US-based service providers Lido Finance, Coinbase, Bitcoin Suisse, Kraken, and staked.us control approximately 60% of the network’s 416,000 validating node systems. These share providers may begin to censor Tornado Cash-related transactions at the base layer if they agree to abide by US sanctions. However, it is still unclear whether such censorship will occur when Ethereum switches to PoS.
AntPool gave until September 3
By September 3, AntPool has asked its customers to update their accounts with their own private address. The company will then provide total PoW mining rewards to private addresses. AntPool has also endorsed PoW blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic, which it claims are based on the “decentralized PoW consensus,” meanwhile. AntPool has already invested $10 million in addition to supporting the Ethereum Classic ecosystem.
As you follow on Kriptokoin.com, the v22.8.1 update required for the merge was released on August 22. Following the Bellatrix upgrade on September 6, the scheduled date for the update is September 15. However, this date may change.
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