Poolin halts payout for BTC, ETH hash rate tokens after China's crackdown

[Tubelight]

Poolin, one of the major Chinese crypto mining pools, has temporarily halted the bitcoin and ether mining payouts to users who have staked their hash rate tokens on Poolin's Mars protocol.

Poolin said in a blog post on Friday that the operations of its proprietary bitcoin miners that serve as the underlying assets backing its recently issued pBTC35A and pETH18C hash rate tokens have been shut down as a result of the recent orders issued by the Chinese governments in Xinjiang and Sichuan.

Poolin rolled out the two ERC-20 tokens earlier this year that can be staked to earn wBTC and ether based on the computing hash rate that each unit of the token represents and that is mining on their respective networks.

"After Sichuan policy's shoe dropped, we realize this time’s unexpected shutting down would eventually make unbearable economic loss on whole project which would likely leads to operational hardness. In this case, team decides to pause the wBTC/ETH output for all pBTC35A and pETH18C for less than 60 days which corresponding to the estimated schedule of miners migration," the firm said.

"In [the] previous 30days, the Mars team has visited a lot of mining farms and signed long term facility hosting contracts with some mining farms under top-tier names," Poolin said in the blog post, adding it's currently relocating the machines backing the Mars project to new facilities with an expectation that the process will take 35 to 40 days.

The prices of pBTC35A and pETH18C both have fallen significantly from their initial sales prices and all-time-highs.

Poolin initially sold pBTC35A for $100 per each unit that has an underlying hash rate of 1 TH/s. It has now dropped to below $50 on Uniswap, down nearly 60% from its all-time-high of above $120.

The price for pETH18C has also plunged by over 60%, sliding below $10 just about three months after Poolin launched the token at $30.

Poolin's suspension is the latest event that crypto mining operations are being severely impacted by China's crackdown.

Nearly 50% of the bitcoin network's total hash rate has gone offline since Xinjiang and Sichuan handed down the shutdown order for mining farms.

Following that, there has been a spiking circulating supply of secondhand bitcoin miners on the market as a result of the shutdown policy.source