SBI Crypto will close its Bitcoin mining pool on July 31, 2026, affecting about 2.2% of the Bitcoin network’s hashrate, the operator announced. The pool will stop accepting new mining shares at 22:00 UTC on July 30, making the shutdown a planned exit rather than an abrupt disruption.
The closure reflects a broader strategic shift by parent company SBI Holdings away from energy-intensive mining and toward trading, custody and exchange-related services. The decision moves institutional exposure from Bitcoin production toward financial market infrastructure.
SBI Reallocates Crypto Strategy Away From Mining
SBI Holdings has framed the pool closure as a deliberate recalibration of its crypto operations. SBI Crypto launched public mining services in March 2021 and later expanded into merged mining for Litecoin and Dogecoin in July 2023, but the group now appears focused on higher-priority trading and custody businesses.
The company has also signaled investment in market-adjacent operations, including an agreement to acquire a Japanese crypto exchange. That direction suggests SBI sees liquidity services and regulated intermediation as more sustainable than operating hashing infrastructure.
At its peak, the mining pool was a meaningful participant in global Bitcoin production. Published figures placed its contribution at roughly 15 to 21.46 exahashes per second, equal to about 2.2% of total network hashrate and ranking SBI Crypto among the top 12 mining pools globally.
The closure will not remove the underlying mining machines from the network, but it will require miners connected to SBI Crypto to redirect hashpower. That makes miner migration the central operational issue before the July cutoff.
Miners Face a Pool Migration Deadline
Miners using SBI Crypto have been advised to migrate before the pool stops accepting new shares on July 30. Failure to move hashpower in time could create temporary lapses in reward processing for late-switching participants.
Industry alternatives named for displaced miners include Braiins, Luxor and NeoPool. Braiins has offered to honor existing pool fee arrangements for migrating miners, which could reduce short-term economic friction during the transition.
Operationally, the migration process will require miners to update pool endpoints, verify payout settings and monitor reward continuity. Late or poorly configured transitions could produce temporary latency issues or marginally higher orphan-risk exposure.
For the broader mining market, the shutdown highlights continued consolidation pressure. Hashrate now assigned to SBI Crypto is likely to redistribute across remaining pools, creating a one-off reallocation of competitive capacity rather than a structural loss of Bitcoin security.
The decision also illustrates how legacy financial groups are reassessing where crypto capital is best deployed. SBI’s move suggests regulated exchanges, custody platforms and trading infrastructure may offer more attractive institutional scaling paths than direct mining operations.
For miners, the immediate priority is continuity. For institutions, the broader takeaway is that crypto infrastructure investment is rotating toward businesses tied to liquidity, compliance and client flow, making SBI’s mining exit part of a larger market-structure shift.
