A major Japanese Bitcoin mining pool just pulled the plug on its Bitcoin service just as 3 mega-miners claimed 60% of the network
SBI Crypto shut down its Japan Bitcoin pool on July 31 after a sharp decline in activity. Its seven-day average hashrate fell 64% in a month, from 16.222 EH/s for the period ending June 30 to 5.817 EH/s by July 30, with 24-hour output near 0.452 EH/s on July 31. Share acceptance stopped at 22:00 UTC on July 30, with a full Stratum shutdown scheduled for later that day and website data retained for history and payouts. On July 31, Foundry USA, AntPool, and F2Pool briefly accounted for about 60% of attributed blocks, but that reading was a snapshot, not a stable shift. Weekly buckets already showed those three pools above 60% before SBI Crypto’s cutoff, and the July 27 bucket was still incomplete. Pool-share data show overall concentration, but they do not reveal where SBI Crypto’s missing hashrate went.
