Japan's SBI Is Pulling the Plug on Its Bitcoin Mining Pool — 2% of the Network Needs a New Home

SBI Crypto, the mining arm of Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings, is shutting down its Bitcoin mining pool on July 31 — and the roughly 2% of the network's total hashrate pointed at it, around 20,400 PH/s, now has less than a month to find a new home.

What Happened

The pool, one of the dozen largest in the world, will stop accepting mining shares at the end of the month, per announcements first reported around July 2. Miners who don't redirect their machines before the cutoff will simply stop earning. SBI gave no official reason for the closure, but the backdrop is hard to miss: mining margins have been compressed across the industry by rising operational costs and a brutal difficulty environment.

The timing tells its own story. Just a week before the shutdown news, SBI Holdings disclosed a ¥46.7 billion (roughly $289 million) deal to take full ownership of Bitbank, one of Japan's largest licensed crypto exchanges, expected to close around October. SBI isn't retreating from crypto — it's swapping the low-margin business of coordinating miners for the fee-generating business of running exchanges.

Why It Matters

Two percent of Bitcoin's hashrate is not a security threat — the network will re-balance without blinking. But it's a meaningful shake-up at the top of the mining leaderboard, and every pool consolidation nudges Bitcoin's hashrate distribution further toward a shrinking club of mega-pools. Where SBI's displaced petahashes land matters: if they flow to the top two or three pools, concentration concerns get louder.

It's also a signal about where institutional money thinks crypto profits live in 2026. A conglomerate with SBI's scale exiting pool operations while writing a nine-figure check for an exchange is a fairly blunt verdict on mining economics.

What's Next

Watch the pool distribution charts through August to see who absorbs the orphaned hashrate. And watch SBI: with Bitbank expected in the fold by October, Japan's crypto exchange market — already one of the most tightly regulated anywhere — is about to get a much heavier hitter.

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