Popular bitcoin mining pool, Antpool has announced its intention to stop managing Ethereum-oriented accounts after the completion of the merge. Antpool directed every participant in its mining pool to integrate Ethereum withdrawal addresses before September 3. According to the protocol, this will enable them to receive their accumulated Ether tokens.

Antpool’s decision to stop backing Ethereum assets comes barely a week after it invested $10 million to foster Ethereum Classic (ETC). According to Antpool, “As ETH 2.0 comes along with the risk of censorship among different countries, 

Antpool, for the sake of clients’ asset security, will not be able to maintain the user’s ETH assets on the PoS chain.” The pool maintained its preference for a decentralized proof-of-work by Satoshi Nakamoto. Antpool further said that it still “fully supports BTC, ETC and other PoW tokens.”

What you need to know about the imminent Ethereum merge

This development comes in the wake of the announcement by the Ethereum foundation that its Merge will unfold in September. The Merge is an upgrade to Ethereum, thereby migrating the blockchain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) model. According to the foundation, the merge would unfold when Ethereum Mainnet secured a block height of 15,540,293. 

It further states that the upgrade will manifest in two stages, Bellatrix and Paris. As designed, the Bellatrix stage will unfold as a consensus layer upgrade to allow the Beacon Chain “Merge aware.” On the other hand, Paris will manifest as the execution layer’s1 transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Ahead of the merge, Antpool has now issued a September 3 ultimatum to its customers to acquire the remaining Ether mined by Antpool’s Ethereum mining operation. The pool noted that the imminent merge would ferment numerous censorship risks. It, however, promised to share the remaining ETH Antpool mined next month.

Antpool promises to keep “providing Ethash mining pool services for users who plan to keep mining Ethash tokens like Ethereum Classic, and will make every effort to ensure hash power stability and asset security.”

The Ethereum blockchain enjoys about 1,000 terahash per second (TH/s) hash power. Ethermine is currently the biggest ETH mining pool. It controls over 263 terahash of hash power. Antpool, on the other hand, ranks tenth on the list of ETH mining pools. It reportedly commands 17.9 terahash of hash power. Just like Antpool,  Ethermine has also decided to stop supporting ETH assets. The pool hinted that it would not mine a new PoW version of ETH.

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