One of China's leading BTC mining pools shuts down

One of China's biggest Bitcoin mining pools, BytePool, announced its pending shutdown. The announcement comes as a surprise for the crypto community. Especially since the company's hashrate started seeing a steady recovery in the last several days.

Bitcoin halving will make mining unprofitable, says BytePool

According to China's local media sources, the decision did not come due to technical issues. Instead, the mining pool decided to shut down due to the upcoming Bitcoin halving. The halving will cut BTC block rewards in half, reducing them from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC per block.

The company sees this as a major issue that will lead to a lack of profitability. With the reduced rewards and the price per Bitcoin still remaining low, the firm decided to close down shop.

As mentioned, the company recently started seeing the recovery of its hashrate. The recovery comes after the rate sank from 4000 petahashes per second to only 200 petahashes about a month ago. Now, it seems that the pool will abandon BTC for good, and potentially switch to mining altcoins.

BytePool is one of the two pools operated by Sichuan-based Valarhash. The other pool operated by the firm is 1THash.top. Meanwhile, Valarhash also launched another platform, 1Tmining, which deals in cloud mining, and Nelson, a mining management software.

Interestingly, both mining pools were very successful up to this point. They both belonged among the top 10 mining pools, and they generated around 9% of Bitcoin's total mining hashrate.

Coronavirus outbreak’s heavy impact on crypto mining sector

The recent BTC price crash had a major impact on the smaller mining pools, forcing them to shut down. However, hardly anyone had expected that the same fate will befall one of the major pools, such as BytePool. The pool even managed to survive the Chinese authorities' forcible shutdowns that took place earlier this year.

The move came in an attempt to stop the spreading of coronavirus, back when it originally emerged in Wuhan. While BytePool is leaving the mining sector, it might quickly get replaced by Binance, however. The exchange revealed recently that it plans to launch its own mining pool. So far, Binance did not release a lot of details. However, given its reputation, it is very likely that the exchange will try to top the industry. At the very least, it won't be long before Binance becomes a major competitor.