SBI Crypto Shuts Down Bitcoin Mining Pool July 31, Displacing 2% of Hashrate
SBI Crypto is shutting down its Bitcoin mining pool on July 31, 2026, giving miners less than 30 days to redirect roughly 20.9 EH/s. No reason was given. The outcome is a live test of pool decentralization.
SBI Crypto gives miners 29 days to redirect 20.9 EH/s. Where it lands is the decentralization test.
Key takeaways
- SBI Crypto is closing its Bitcoin mining pool on July 31, 2026, with shares rejected after 07:00 JST that morning, per the company's official shutdown notice.
- The pool accounts for roughly 20.9 EH/s, about 2.2% of Bitcoin's total network hashrate per Luxor's Hashrate Index.
- SBI gave no reason for the closure. Parent company SBI Holdings has agreed to acquire crypto exchange Bitbank for roughly $289 million, signaling a pivot away from mining infrastructure.
SBI Crypto, the mining subsidiary of Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Group, announced it will permanently shut down its Bitcoin mining pool on July 31, 2026. The pool currently represents approximately 2.2% of global hashrate. Miners have less than 30 days to redirect their machines.
The company issued no explanation. The shutdown notice, signed by CEO Hiroaki Morita, focused entirely on operational logistics: keep mining until the cutoff to ensure final payout eligibility, and consider transitioning to Luxor, Braiins, or NeoPool, with SBI explicitly noting it does not endorse any of the three.
What SBI Crypto Told Miners
The pool stops accepting mining shares at 07:00 JST on July 31 (22:00 UTC July 30). Shares submitted after that cutoff will not count toward the final payout. The notice urged customers to stay on the pool until the last moment: "To ensure that all eligible mining shares are included in the final payout calculation, we strongly recommend that customers continue directing their hashrate to the SBI Crypto mining pool until the scheduled cutoff time."
The pool launched publicly in April 2021, backed at the time by roughly 1.1 EH/s of SBI's own mining power. It grew to rank 12th globally by hashrate, per SimpleMining data. A 7-day average of 20.9 EH/s per Luxor's Hashrate Index, or 21.46 EH/s per SimpleMining (both round to approximately 2.2%), will now be up for redistribution.
The Decentralization Test
Bitcoin doesn't care that SBI Crypto is shutting down. The difficulty adjustment will absorb any short-term hashrate drop, and those miners will point their ASICs somewhere else within days. Pools are service providers, not gatekeepers. That's the point.
The question worth tracking is where 20.9 EH/s actually goes. Foundry USA currently controls roughly 24% of global hashrate, AntPool around 19%. If squeezed miners take the path of least resistance and pile into the dominant pools, this event nudges the network toward a world where two or three entities hold majority visibility over block production. If the hash disperses into Braiins, Luxor, OCEAN, or smaller alternatives, the network gets healthier.
The falsifiable thesis: Bitcoin's permissionless pool market handles this redistribution without meaningful centralization risk. The trigger that breaks it: Foundry cracks 30% on a 7-day average in the two weeks after July 31. Watch the pool distribution charts at Luxor's Hashrate Index and mempool.space closely. This is also a recruitment moment for decentralized pool infrastructure. The first Stratum V2 job declaration block was mined recently. Miners burned by pool-level risk have reason to look seriously at setups that give them their own block templates.
What SBI's Exit Signals
The lack of any stated reason is notable, but the broader context fills in some gaps. Running a mid-tier public mining pool in 2026 carries real margin pressure: Bitcoin's price has pulled back sharply from its fall 2024 highs, and operational costs have not followed. The AI infrastructure buildout is repricing power in ways that squeeze miners who don't own their energy stack. Some miners are pivoting compute to AI entirely.
SBI Group's concurrent move to acquire full control of crypto exchange Bitbank for approximately $289 million (46.7 billion yen) tells the real story. The parent is reallocating toward exchange and custody operations with cleaner margins and regulatory leverage, and shedding the pool business. This is not a hobbyist giving up. This is an institutional player with mining infrastructure since 2017 deciding that running a public pool is no longer worth the overhead.
Pool consolidation is happening at the institutional level. Mid-tier operators are exiting. The sovereign mining argument and the home miner argument both get stronger as the pool layer consolidates around a handful of large players.
What to Watch Before July 31
Miners currently on SBI Crypto's pool have a hard deadline. The 29-day window is tight for small-to-mid-size operations that need to evaluate fee structures, evaluate payout methods (PPS vs. FPPS), reconfigure hardware, and confirm no final payout gets left behind. The clock is running.
Pool distribution data in the first two weeks of August will be the real verdict on whether this exit tightens concentration or spreads cleanly across the market.
Sources
Frequently Asked Questions
Miners need to redirect their hashrate to a new pool before 07:00 JST on July 31, 2026. Shares submitted after the cutoff will not be included in any payout. SBI's notice recommended continuing to mine on the pool until the final moment to maximize payout eligibility, then transitioning to another pool. SBI named Luxor, Braiins, and NeoPool as options but explicitly did not endorse any of them.
No. Losing 2.2% of hashrate is a rounding error for a network running at this scale. Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment mechanism recalibrates approximately every two weeks, automatically compensating for any hashrate that drops off. Those miners are not leaving the network; they're changing their pool address. The security impact is negligible.
SBI's own notice named Luxor, Braiins, and NeoPool, noting that some may offer transition incentives. Beyond those three, Foundry USA and AntPool are the two largest by hashrate, though directing more hash to already-dominant pools increases concentration risk. OCEAN is worth evaluating for miners who want non-custodial payouts and more transparency over block template construction.
