AntPool announced that it will cease maintaining client assets on Ethereum once the blockchain transitions into proof-of-stake. AntPool stated that it will stop maintaining client assets due to the “risk of censorship.”
AntPool is owned by Bitmain mining giant, and stated it would no longer maintain clients’ Ethereum assets after the blockchain moves towards proof-of-stake in The Merge next month.
Merge will transform Ethereum from proof-of work (PoW), consensus, to proof-of stake (PoS), which will eliminate the need for transactions being verified by miners.
AntPool, a mining pool for Ethereum, allows multiple users to plug in their computing resources and share processing power to mine reward coins. Antpool deposits mining rewards to users’ accounts.
The company stated that it will not be able maintain client assets on Ethereum 2.0 and shared a plan to settle with them before The Merge.
The “risk of censorship” will lead to the firm ceasing maintenance of client assets after Ethereum’s PoS upgrade. It is being feared that Ethereum validators could be coerced to censor transactions linked to US sanctions on Tornado Cash.
It stated that ETH2.0 (The Merge), comes with the risk of censorship between different countries. ANTPOOL, for clients’ asset security will not be able maintain the user’s ETH assets in the PoS chain.
Validators will process transactions on Ethereum when proof of stake is implemented. Staking providers control a large portion of validators. For example, US-based providers such as Coinbase, Bitcoin Suisse and Kraken control 60% the 416,000 validator Nodes on the Ethereum network.
Staking validators must agree to the US sanctions in order to filter transactions that are associated with Tornado cash on the base layer. It remains to be seen whether such censorship will occur as Ethereum transitions from PoS.
AntPool requested that its clients add their private addresses to their accounts by September 3rd. The firm will then send the PoW mining payouts to private addresses.
AntPool also supports proof-of-work blockchains like Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin. It also invested $10 million in the ecosystem.
