Monero’s biggest mining pool to shutdown on August 12 after boycott by XMR miners

• Several Monero community members pointed out that MINEXMR was dangerously close to a 51 percent attack on the Monero network.
• The top three XMR mining pools have concentrated more than 80 percent of the total global hash power of Monero.

Privacy blockchain network Monero could see a major change this month in terms of miner contribution. Monero’s largest mining pool, MINEXMR, announced a shutdown by August 12 and will proceed further with a transition to a decentralized p2p pool.

As of now, MINEXMR controls more than 44 percent of the network’s hashrate. However, this has caused a stir in the Monero community that is debating on several forums and social media platforms arguing over whether or not it will threaten decentralization. One user by the name Mano Crypto on Twitter wrote:

Urgent: Immediately leave mining pool MINEXMR today! If you are mining Monero, and you support this pool, you are also responsible for the centralization of the monero hashrate! they control 48% of the hashrate today, WTF.

There have been similar complaints on the Monero-centric subreddit r/monero. On this subreddit, community members were trending “boycott MINEXMR” while stressing that the pool is “too close to 51%”.

A 51 percent attack means that a miner can gain absolute control over the entire network by controlling a majority of the hashpower. Furthermore, such kinds of attacks can lead to issues of double-spend on the network in addition to deep blockchain reorganizations.

One of the Redditors asked: “Why [do]you still join Minexmr.com? “There are 30+ other pools and [a]decentralised p2pool. But within [one]day, new miners increased Minexmr.com hashrate from 1.34 to 1.44 GH/s. While total network hashrate is 3.31 GH/s”.

Monero XMR miner’s pool list

As per the details by pools.xmr.wiki MINEXMR mining pool alone contributed 1.48052 gigahash per second (GH/s) to the Monero network. The second in line is Nanopool which accounts for 21.82% of XMR’s global hashrate. Similarly, the third in line is Supportxmr which commands 14.85% of XMR’s global hash rate.

As we can see the top three mining pools alone contribute to more than 80 percent of XMR’s global hashrate. All the pools that come after them have significantly lower hashpower contributions to the Monero blockchain.

One of the admins from the MINEXMR team responded to the latest backlash. The admin noted that the organization has seen the complaints and will plan to increase the pool fees to address the concerns. Speaking on Reddit, one of the admins said:

We understand that people are concerned with the large hashrate that Minexmr currently has. We have announced an increase to the pool fees and continue to monitor the situation.

The Monero community members have been dealing with the issue of mining decentralization since 2018. Monero’s XMR is the largest privacy coin today with a market value of $3.1 billion. During the broader market recovery over the last two weeks, XMR price surged by 20 percent.