Poolin halts payouts on ‘hashrate tokens’ amid crackdown on miners in China

The mining pool Poolin, which controls 11,3% of Bitcoin’s hashrate, announced the suspension of payouts of Bitcoin and Ethereum for users who locked hashrate-tokens in the Mars protocol.

The organisation moved to suspend this step following orders from authorities Xinjiang and Sichuan to halt cryptocurrency mining operations. Such actions affected Poolin’s computing power, depriving it of the ability to access the underlying assets for the hashrate-tokens.

The pBTC35A and pETH18C tokens, issued in January and March, can be staked to earn WBTC and Ethereum. Each ERC-20 token unit represents 1 TH/s and 1 MH/s of hashrate in the respective networks.

The payout suspension is for up to 60 days, in line with the expected miner-migration schedule.

“Over the last 30 days, the Mars team has signed long-term hosting contracts with some of the largest data centres in the industry. We are confident that we will resolve the issue with our partners in the United States”, — the pool explained in a blog post.

According to CoinGecko, in the last 24 hours the price of pBTC35A fell by 26.4%, pETH18C by 30.2%. From their all-time highs, the tokens are down 68.5% and 71.1%, respectively.

The crackdown on miners in China has led to a rise in the supply of used ASIC devices.

Foundry’s vice president Kevin Zhang estimated that 70% of the lost hashrate resulted from Chinese authorities’ actions. The specialist predicted that by the end of June the figure would rise to 90%.

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