Coinhive shuts down as Monero is forked again

In an abrupt decision made last week, the maintainers of the Coinhive project and the project’s owners have announced that they will be ceasing operations and pulling the plug on their browser-based mining services this month. With the waning popularity of crypto mining in the browser and the enormous drops in the value of Monero from its height of $425 back in May 2018, there’s not enough business interest to keep Coinhive going.

In a blog post on the Coinhive site, the team writes that the decision shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone given the falling value of cryptocurrency overall. The reasons for the shutdown include the drop-off in popularity on the Monero mining network (which means that transactions slow down a lot), and the increase in the hashrate difficulty, which makes getting any value from mining on the CPU for a brief moment mostly pointless.

“Some of you might have anticipated this, some of you will be surprised. The decision has been made. We will discontinue our service on March 8, 2019. It has been a blast working on this project over the past 18 months, but to be completely honest, it isn’t economically viable anymore.

“The drop in hash rate (over 50%) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard. So did the “crash“ of the crypto currency market with the value of XMR depreciating over 85% within a year. 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.

“Thus, mining will not be operable anymore after March 8, 2019. Your dashboards will still be accessible until April 30, 2019 so you will be able to initiate your payouts if your balance is above the minimum payout threshold.

“Thank you all for the great time we had together.”

The Coinhive miner saw a surge in popularity as websites began including the Javascript miner on their website landing pages, hoping to use their visitor’s processors to mine a small piece of a block before they navigated away to another page. Coinhive made headlines worldwide as it was included on the landing site for The Pirate Bay, and multiple users complained that the miner’s load was rendering their systems unusable due to the lag.

As an alternative to showing advertising on websites that included link trackers and all sorts of other things for advertisers to use to fingerprint their users digitally, mining Monero was hailed as a privacy-focused alternative to showing adverts because the user wasn’t tracked. With the shutdown of Coinhive many websites who received some revenue from the miner will now have to seek out alternatives to keep funds rolling in.

Last Updated: March 6, 2019