On August 27, Antpool informed its customers that post the Merge upgrade it will not be maintaining ETH assets. The crypto mining pool has provided September 3 as the deadline for an ETH address to collect the rest of the Ether mined by the Ethereum mining operation of Antpool. The statistics reveal that there are approx, 1,000 terahash per second (TH/s) of hashpower allotted to the ETH blockchain. And, in terms of hashrate, Antpool acquires the tenth position.
Meanwhile, Ethermine is the largest ETH mining pool in terms of hashrate. In comparison to Antpool’s 17.9 terahash, Ethermine has 263 terahash of hashpower. The mining pool also announced that it would stop backing ETH assets. It also declined to mine a new PoW version of ETH. A censorship risk is involved in the Merge, and the pool will also distribute the rest of the ETH Antpool mined next month.
On 27 August, the mining pool operation explained that Antpool can no longer maintain the user’s ETH assets on the PoS chain since the ETH 2,0 risk censorship among different countries. Antpool also said that the pool is also in favor of proof-of-work created by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is in absolute favor of BTC, and ETC among other PoWs tokens.
But the mining pool will continue to offer Ethash mining pool services to users who intend to retain mining Ethash tokens such as Ethereum Classic. Antpool will continue to make attempts to ensure the security and stability of the assets.
The news surfaced after Antpool’s July 26 announcement by Lv Lei, CEO of the mining pool, shared at the mining summit of Bitmain that the firm invested $10 million to aid Ethereum Classic (ETC). On August 26, 2022, the hasrate of ETC recorded another ATH when it touched 39.58 terahash per second (TH/s).
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/08/30/antpool-discloses-its-plans-to-stop-maintaining-ethereum-ethash-support/