SBI Crypto shuts Bitcoin pool as three pools hold 60%

SBI Crypto, a Tokyo‑based Bitcoin mining pool operator, shut down its pool on July 31 after a rapid fall in attributed hashrate. The service stopped accepting shares at 22:00 UTC on July 30 (07:00 JST July 31) and scheduled a full Stratum protocol shutdown for 23:59:59 UTC that night. The company left its site available for historical data and payout status but did not provide a final payout schedule or dates for API and portal access termination. The pool’s block list showed July 29 as its last mined block.

Telemetry recorded a steep decline in the pool’s activity. SBI Crypto’s seven‑day average Bitcoin hashrate fell from 16.222 exahashes per second (EH/s) for the period ending June 30 to 5.817 EH/s for the period ending July 30, a drop of about 64% in one month. Operational snapshots on July 31 put the pool’s 24‑hour average at roughly 0.452 EH/s and its share of attributed blocks at under 1% before the final shutdown sequence.

At 11:22 UTC on July 31, a Hashrate Index snapshot showed Foundry at 26.67% of attributed blocks, AntPool at 17.13% and F2Pool at 16.21%, a combined 60.01% in that instant. Weekly tallies show the three pools already held about 64.8% of attributed work in the week ending July 20 and about 60.78% in the incomplete week that spans the shutdown. SBI’s weekly share narrowed from about 0.98% to 0.62% between those reporting buckets.

Public aggregate pool records do not identify where SBI Crypto’s lost hashrate went. Estimates for the partial July 27 week show mixed shifts: Foundry, AntPool and F2Pool each recorded lower estimated hashrates than in the prior week, Luxor increased, Braiins declined and NeoPool did not appear in the data. Pool statistics credit mined work to services rather than to individual rigs, so the movement of machines that left SBI is not visible in those totals.

Mining pools gather computing power from many individual miners and allocate block rewards based on contributed work. Hashrate measures the total computational effort and is expressed in exahashes per second (EH/s) at the network scale. Stratum is a common protocol pools use to send work to miners and manage the submission of partial results, called shares.