Coinhive, an in-browser Monero cryptocurrency miner which was designed to provide web developers a JavaScript will be terminating its operations soon.
Officials at Coinhive put the news forth in a blog post on February 26 where they cited various reasons for their decision of shutting down all their operations. The post suggested that following a 50 percent drop in hash rate, Cryptocurrency service, Coinhive decided to discontinue its operations on March 8, 2019.
Referencing from the blog post, "The drop in hash rate (over 50%) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard," the company said. "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," said the officials.
The project which no longer is economically viable was launched in September 2017 as an alternative to traditional banner ads.
Before Coinhive’s in-browser Monero mining stops working on March 8, the registered users will be made dashboards accessible until April 30 so that they can withdraw funds from their respective accounts.
The digital currency mining service, despite the consistent efforts of the team never become one of the major websites in the league. Moreover, it was subjected to heavy criticism for skyrocketing the CPU usage inside browsers.
Afterward, it went on becoming immensely popular among cybercriminals for cryptojacking and recently a report from Kaspersky Labs suggested that cryptojacking left behind ransomware and became the biggest cybersecurity threat.
Referencing from the announcement made by the company,
“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 cryptocurrency 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.”
