Mining Pool Shutting Down? A Step-by-Step Exit

A mining pool run by one of the largest crypto exchanges will stop crediting shares at 07:00 UTC on November 10, 2026, closing a service it opened in April 2020. CoinDesk's report on the closure says the hashrate pointed at it fell from about 26 EH/s in December, roughly 2.3% of the network, to about 9.2 EH/s now, under 1%. The exchange gave no financial reason; its notice cites a review of its products. The same notice closes the pool's savings product, its cloud-mining offer, its transaction accelerator and its mining API.

A mining pool shutting down is not rare this year. A pool owned by a Japanese financial group closed on July 31, after handling about 2% of the network's hashrate, and a pool that was once the largest in the world filed for bankruptcy in July. Each closure leaves miners with the same job: move the hardware before the cutoff, collect what they are owed, and choose where the work goes next. Here is that job in order.

Step 1: Put the mining pool shutdown dates in your calendar

Three dates matter, and they are not the same day. On November 10 at 07:00 UTC the pool stops crediting shares, so any work sent after that moment earns nothing. Anyone waiting on a final payout has until 23:59 UTC on November 10 to finish the identity checks the exchange requires. On November 24 the pool pages disappear for good. Write all three down now. A rig that keeps hashing into a closed pool on November 11 is running up an electricity bill for nothing.

Step 2: Download your records before the pages disappear

Export your share history, your payout history and your worker list while the pages still load. You may need them for taxes, for an accounting dispute, or to know how each machine performed over the last year. Fourteen days between the cutoff and the deletion sounds like plenty. It is not much if you only remember the export after the pages are gone.

Step 3: Get the balance out and check it on-chain

This pool paid miners under full pay-per-share, a model where the pool credits each share at an expected value and keeps the earnings as an account balance until you withdraw them. That model has real advantages: steady income, with the pool carrying the variance. It also means that between payouts your earnings are a number in someone else's database, not coins at an address you control. When the operator closes the service, that balance depends on the operator's process, its deadlines and its identity checks.

So withdraw what you can, finish the checks early, and then look up the payout transaction on a block explorer yourself. A screen that says "paid" is not the same as a transaction confirmed to your own address.

Step 4: Decide what kind of pool you want next

Before you paste a new stratum address into the rig, decide what you want from the next pool. A pooled-payout service gives you small, regular income and holds a balance for you between payouts. Solo mining gives you nothing at all most of the time and, in the rare case that your rig finds a block, the whole reward. Neither is a better bet. The odds of finding a block are set by your hashrate divided by the network's difficulty, and they are the same at every pool, NexusPool included. No pool, protocol or payout model changes them.

What does differ is who holds the money. At NexusPool, a solo pool with a 0% fee, a found block pays the miner's own address directly in the block's coinbase transaction, so there is no balance for the pool to hold and nothing to withdraw when a service closes. The trade-off is plain: if your rig never finds a block, you never get paid. If you need steady income from your machines, a pooled-payout service is the honest fit, and you should pick one by the same tests in this checklist.

Step 5: Check where the reward would go before you move a single rig

Whatever you choose, test the payout path before the hardware moves. For a solo pool that pays in the coinbase, you can see this directly: NexusPool's Payout Preflight rebuilds the coinbase transaction a block would carry for your address on the current chain tip, so you can confirm the output is yours before you mine a single share. Read the pool's terms too, especially the parts about fees, payout and what happens if the service ends. If a pool cannot tell you where a found block's reward goes, keep looking.

Step 6: Repoint the rigs early, with a backup line

Do not wait for the last week. Change the stratum address on one machine first, watch it for an hour, then move the rest. Keep a second pool line in each rig's configuration as a fallback, so a short outage does not leave a machine idle overnight. Before you switch, check the new pool's status page or its equivalent to make sure its servers are up in the region closest to you.

Step 7: Confirm the new pool is counting your work

For the first day, check that each worker shows as online and that its shares are being accepted at a rate that matches its hashrate. A worker that reports hashing on its own screen but shows nothing at the pool usually has a typo in the address or the username. At NexusPool you can also follow how the pool accounts for work through the signed records on the Glass Ledger, which you can check yourself instead of trusting a dashboard.

The sequence, in short

One pool closing makes the choice smaller for everyone. The three largest pools already hold about 64% of the network's hashrate, according to the tables CoinDesk cites, and every exit like this one pushes some of the freed hashrate somewhere else. Miners can still choose smaller providers, and the hardware stays theirs whatever the pool decides. The steps above are the same whichever pool you move to: note the three dates, export your records, get the balance out and confirm it on-chain, pick a payout model with open eyes about the odds, check where a found block would pay, move one rig before the rest, and watch the first day of shares. None of it is investment advice, and none of it changes the odds of finding a block. It only makes sure that your work, and anything it earns, ends up where you expect.

Trust nothing. Verify where your next block would pay before you move a single rig.