Jakhon Khabilov, head of the Sigmapool mining pool, said Binance is already offering potential clients “generous” referral bonuses as it has been reaching out to some miners in China to promote the upcoming new service.
Binance is planning to launch its own mining pool, a first for the popular crypto exchange.
The news was broken Tuesday by the Russian crypto news publication Coinlife and later confirmed by three sources in the mining business. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted about the pool on Wednesday.
“The company has already hired some professionals for this purpose, some of them former Bitmain employees. The launch is planned for the Q2 2020”, Coinlife wrote.
The exchange is following the lead of its peers, OKex and Huobi, which launched their own mining pools in August and September 2019, respectively. Both exchanges’ pools are currently among the top 10 pools producing the most blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain, according to Blockchain.com.
Alejandro de la Torre, the vice president of Pooling, currently number two most-popular mining pool, says the key motivation for exchanges to get into the bitcoin mining game is liquidity: Mining is the cheapest way to add liquidity to exchanges, he said.
Igor Runets, CEO of the Bitriver mining farm in Russia, believes launching a mining pool is a logical step for a crypto exchange: “Both these businesses are software-based, so no additional professional skills are needed. The client base would largely overlap: many mining pool users are also clients of exchanges.”
Baidu Employee Jailed for Mining Crypto on 200 Company Servers
Working at internet giant Baidu provided too much temptation for one employee, who got in legal hot water for harnessing the firm’s massive trove of servers to mine cryptocurrency.According to a report from China-focused news site Abacus on Monday, An Bang – a senior engineer working on Baidu’s popular search engine – downloaded monero mining scripts onto around 200 Baidu servers between April and June 2018.
The extra load on the systems, though, was spotted by the company, which made a report to police, resulting in the staffer’s arrest. An was ultimately handed down three years’ jail time and a fine of 11,000 Chinese yuan ($1,568) in sentencing last month, as per the report.
The case is the latest in a string of instances where employees have succumbed to the ease of access to workplace power or infrastructure to try and make some free crypto, only to fall foul of the law.
Recently, in Russia, scientists at a top secret nuclear lab were given time in a penal colony or fines for the same crime. Ukraine has also had staff within its court system and railways caught red-handed mining their illicit gains at work.
