With the recent news of additional cryptocurrency crackdowns in China via the People’s Bank of China there has been some speculation about what that would mean for the various cryptocurrency services, including crypto exchanges based there and the Chinese pools like Hpool.
First the crypto exchanges. Huobi has announced that they will be scaling back services to their Chinese customers until the end of the year where they will no longer service them. They have already stopped taking on new customers in China. This is a reasonable reaction, gives their existing customers time to transfer or exist their positions on a timeline that works for them. It appears that other exchanges are following suit.
As for the pools earlier today SparkPool, the first or second biggest Ethereum pool before all this, announced that they would be shutting down their operations entirely. They are based in China and so deeply affected by this issue. Chris from FlexPool actually predicted this a few days ago on ChiaForum. So what about the Chinese Chia pools?
Well, as you can see Chia Pool AWPool has announced they are shutting down quickly because of the regulatory environment. One would assume HuobiPool will close considering their exchange position. And what about Hpool? As of right now there is nothing on their site. They have moved off of Chinese domains for the web presence and according to MiningPoolStats they haven’t lost any space yet. In fact, none of the big Chinese pools are reporting space drops yet, so it doesn’t look like a look of folks are shutting down their farms over there.
I think this is going to have a pretty big ripple on the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole. China is an important player in the mining / farming world, and if they really are getting forced out that will be a loss for us all. I have really enjoyed my conversations with our Chinese compatriots and I think they bring a lot to the ecosystem. I didn’t dislike Hpool because they were Chinese, but because they were closed source and didn’t really participate in the community. Since then they have participated more as well as done everything in their power to move their farmers to their NFT plot pool. I wish them the best through this, and I hope they survive, but it is pretty clear now that there is going to be a mass shutdown of Chinese pools for all coins – including Chia.
