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SBI Crypto Is Closing Its Bitcoin Mining Pool, and Miners Have Weeks to Move

By Isaac • July 2, 2026 12:41 pm • Comments

SBI Crypto is shutting down its Bitcoin mining pool on July 31, 2026. The pool stops accepting mining shares on the cutoff date, and anything submitted after that will not count.

This is a pool tied to SBI Group, one of Japan’s largest financial conglomerates. The pool opened in 2021, so this is far from some fly-by-night operation walking away.

SBI Crypto recently accounted for roughly 2% of Bitcoin’s network hashrate. That is real hashpower that now has to find a new place to point before the end of the month.

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The company urged its miners to keep hashing with the pool right up to the cutoff so their eligible shares get counted in the final payout. After that, the door closes.

A pool closing is not Bitcoin closing. The network keeps producing blocks every ten minutes or so no matter which pool a miner uses, because a pool is just the place where individual miners combine hashpower and split rewards.

When a pool shuts down, its miners redirect their machines to another pool. The hashrate does not vanish.

It moves.

CoinDesk broke the news on July 2, reporting the July 31 shutdown and the hard cutoff for mining shares.

The report says SBI Crypto told miners the pool will stop accepting mining shares at the end of July and that shares submitted after the cutoff will not be counted. It also says miners will need to redirect their machines to another pool before the service goes dark.

CoinDesk noted that SBI Crypto did not give a specific reason for the closure. The timing lands against a harder mining backdrop, with lower margins, volatile network hashrate, rising operating costs, and more pressure on every business that sits around Bitcoin’s block-reward economy.

The shutdown also comes after SBI Crypto reported a roughly $21 million hack last year, though the report did not present that incident as the reason for the pool closure. The cleaner read is that the company is ending a real pool business without publicly tying the decision to one single cause.

For miners, the practical issue is not debate over motive. It is operational timing.

Machines that keep pointing at a dead pool after the cutoff will not earn through that pool, so the work has to move before the final window closes.

Hashrate Index data put SBI Crypto around 2.15% of pool hashrate in the recent snapshot.

That placed SBI Crypto behind much larger pools such as Foundry USA, AntPool, F2Pool, ViaBTC, and SpiderPool. A two-percent pool is meaningful, but it is not large enough to control Bitcoin block production or force a network-level shock by leaving.

The number is useful because it keeps the story in scale. Bitcoin has seen pool share move around many times, and miners can redirect equipment to a different endpoint without replacing the underlying ASIC fleet.

Pool concentration still matters. If more hashpower flows toward the biggest operators after SBI Crypto exits, the leaderboard becomes a little more top-heavy, even if total network security remains tied to the broader global mining fleet.

So the July 31 closure is best read as infrastructure churn. It changes the pool market, and it may slightly reshape where block rewards are coordinated, but it does not mean the underlying hashpower disappears.

SBI Crypto‘s public site still presents the company as a mining-pool service with account access, support, pool information, and API documentation.

That makes the shutdown more notable than a quiet product page disappearing. SBI Group is one of Japan’s largest financial names, and the pool opened to the public in 2021, giving the business a recognizable institutional parent and a multi-year operating history.

The site context also explains why miners care about final payout details. Mining pools track shares, calculate rewards, and distribute payouts based on pool rules, so a winddown has to handle both machine redirection and accounting cleanup.

The company has told miners to keep hashing with the pool until the cutoff so eligible shares are counted before the final close. After that, the responsibility shifts to each miner to point machines somewhere else.

The public-facing materials are plain, but the message is sharp enough. SBI Crypto is not pausing the pool or rebranding it.

The service is ending, and miners have a fixed deadline.

Competitors are watching. Braiins, a rival pool, publicly said it was sad to see SBI Crypto close because competition in the pool space is good for Bitcoin.

That is the honest read here. Fewer independent pools means more concentration, and mining people generally like the sport to have more teams, not fewer.

The bigger picture is churn in mining infrastructure, not weakness in Bitcoin itself. A financial group deciding a pool is not worth running tells you about pool economics, not about the security of the chain.

For the miners on SBI Crypto, the clock is the story. They have weeks to move their machines, and the pool leaderboard will reshuffle a little once they do.

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