AntPool, which is operated by the mining giant Bitmain, stated in an article published by The Merge that it will no longer hold clients’ assets on Ethereum after the Ethereum blockchain transitions to proof-of-stake the following month.
As a result of The Merge, Ethereum will make the shift from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, which will do away with the requirement that miners verify transactions.
AntPool is a mining pool on Ethereum that allows several users to plug in their computational resources and share processing power in order to mine rewards more efficiently. Antpool deposits the mining rewards of its users directly into their respective accounts.
The business announced its inability to keep clients’ assets on the Ethereum 2.0 network in a blog post published on Saturday. It also disclosed its intention to reach a financial resolution with those clients prior to The Merge.
Following the change to Ethereum’s proof-of-stake system, the company will stop performing maintenance on individual client assets, mostly due to the “danger of censorship.” This is a direct result of the mounting concerns that Ethereum validators may be pressured into assisting in censorship of transactions related to US restrictions against Tornado Cash.
When Ethereum moves to a proof-of-stake consensus model, the validators on the network will be responsible for processing transactions. However, a small number of staking providers exert a significant amount of influence over validators. For instance, providers situated in the United States such as Lido Finance, Coinbase, Bitcoin Suisse, Kraken, and staked.us control over sixty percent of the four hundred and sixteen thousand validator nodes on the Ethereum network.
If stake validators are willing to comply with the US restrictions, they will be able to begin filtering transactions on the base layer that are related with Tornado Cash immediately. Nevertheless, it is still unknown at this time if such censorship will occur once Ethereum makes the switch to PoS.
AntPool requested that all of its users add their personal, private email addresses to their accounts by September 3rd at the latest. After that, the company will send the accumulated rewards from the PoW mining to the respective private addresses.
