- Coinhive to shut down on March 8 but miners can log in to their dashboards until April 30
- Monero price drop is one of the reasons for Coinhive shutdown
- Coinhive has something of a controversial history due to popularity with hackers
Coinhive, a cryptocurrency mining service, has announced that they are shutting down on March 8 because of unprofitable market conditions.
The crypto mining service indicated that the project has become economically nonviable due to the last Monero (XMR) hard fork which caused a 50 percent drop in hash rate. However, miners will be able to access their dashboards until April 30th.
In the last few months, we have seen various crypto platforms laying off staff because of the bear market among other factors.
Industry wide bleed off
Starting with Huobi, the CEO mentioned that they are making budgetary and other plans to survive in the current state of the crypto market as it is today. Next in line was Bitmain Technology, which laid off almost 50% of its staff. Employees of Shapeshift, Steemit, and Coinfloor have also been laid off which brings up the question whether the bear market is the only reason for cryptocurrency firms to make cutbacks.
The announcement read that the price of the monero token (XMR) slumping over 85 percent is among the reasons why they are discontinuing their services.
“This and the announced hard fork and algorithm update of the Monero network on March 9, has lead us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive.”
Number 1 with hackers
Coinhive is a cryptocurrency mining service sold as an alternative to ads on websites. After the code is installed, integrated services use the computing power of visitors to give a small amount of revenue to the sites you visit.
According to Krebs, Coinhive has been a malicious code favorable for crypto hackers:
“Coinhive is the top malicious threat to Web users, thanks to the tendency for Coinhive’s computer code to be used on hacked Web sites to steal the processing power of its visitors’ devices.”
On Feb 15, Symantec discovered potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) on Microsoft Store. These apps were found to be mining cryptocurrency using the CPU power of the victims without their consent. Symantec analysis showed that these apps revealed traces of coinhive based malware code which facilitates XMR mining.