BTC.com is one of two mining pools owned by Bitmain, the dominant manufacturer of ASIC mining hardware.
BTC.com claims to have mined 21 percent of all Bitcoin blocks in 2017, and as of August 2018, accounts to more than 16 percent of the Bitcoin hashrate. And here, it has expanded its offerings to include Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC), the company announced.
With it releasing its own Ethereum mining pools, BTC.com is set to also dominate the Ethereum space.
To do this, BTC.com transfers its experience, by processing over eight quintillion SHA-256d hashes per second, to help Ethereum scale its mining infrastructure.
BTC.com also offers an Ethereum block explorer and API, according to a press release. The service allows miners to switch their hashing power from one pool to another, depending on the market and profit margins. Most notably, the pools include GPU and CPU mining options.
"GPU miners are versatile, still profitable and are not easily replaced in a bear market. It's common for miners to split investment into both," explained Bitmain's project director Zhong Zhuang, saying that the decision comes from depressed prices of cryptocurrencies in 2018.
"Also, there are already ASIC miners for Ethereum and Ethereum Classic which are easier to set up and are dedicated to ethash mining. This will save us from supporting a huge list of GPU coins simultaneously."
“We expect mining operations to grow to 12 [percent] of ETH total hashrate in the next 12 months."
Zhuang said that the firm hopes "to expand Ethereum's network by relaying ... rewards through our [Full Pay Per Share] system," which rewards miners for participating in the pool. Shares are calculated from the block reward, associated by the transaction fees set by gas prices, and up to two uncle blocks (an equivalent of Bitcoin's orphan block, but with a few differences).
By adding two mining pools, the strategy is BTC.com's first step in diversifying its mining portfolio.
While Ethereum has been working on ‘Casper’, an update to replace Proof of Work algorithms with Proof of Stake (PoS), mining continues to run the ETH blockchain. BTC.com is confident that the transition won't deter it from mining Ethereoum.
"it’s still possible to host a mining pool in PoS mode. It will increase the complexity to design such a pool since miners need to deposit ether 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," said Zhuang.
The announcement started a heated debate within the Ethereum community over whether the cryptocurrency should fork to maintain ASIC resistance.
BTC.com is one of the biggest miners of Bitcoin Cash, which was forked from Bitcoin in 2017. With it planning to also include Monero into its portfolio, BTC.com is showing that despite of the low prices of cryptocurrency if compared to 2017, the mining industry is still growing at a rapid pace.