Bitcoin Daily: BTC.com Rolls Out Ethereum Mining Pool; Russia Seeks To Track Crypto Operations

Bitmain subsidiary BTC.com has rolled out a client designed for Ethereum blockchain mining, The Next Web reported. Already, the firm is one of the largest bitcoin mining pools: BTC.com, in particular, makes up 16 percent of the computer power behind bitcoin. In addition, the company comprises approximately 14 percent of the network for bitcoin cash. And now the company has big plans for Ethereum, which was valued at $284.24 as of 6:17 p.m. on Thursday (Aug. 30), according to CoinDesk.

“We expect mining operations to grow to 12 [percent] of ETH total hashrate in the next 12 months,” Zhuang Zhong, who is the director of BTC.com’s mining pool, told TNW. And the firm is undeterred by a potential shift to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus style compared to a Proof-of-Work algorithm.

“It’s still possible to host a mining pool in PoS mode,” Zhong said in a statement. “It will increase the complexity to design such a pool, since miners need to deposit [E]ther to the mining pool, but we have a lot of hands-on experience with wallet and Ethereum smart contracts to make a PoS mining pool possible.”

In other news, authorities in Russia may be looking to monitor transactions involving digital currency, Cryptovest reported. Reports indicate that Rosfinmonitoring, a federal agency in Russia, wants a tool for looking into crypto operations. The tool reportedly seeks to prevent financial crimes as well as track transactions.

According to reports, a Moscow firm called SPI won a bid for the tool. (The firm was behind a program dubbed iRule that insurance firms, credit organizations and law enforcement use in Russia.) With the new tool, which may be ready by year’s end, a user could link a bank card, phone number or bank account number to an individual’s crypto or eWallet transactions.

The government agency, Rosfinmonitoring, and SBI would provide the BBC with a comment “saying that the project is classified information,” Cryptovest reported.