CoinHive crypto-mining service announces shutdown

CoinHive, hackers” favorite crypto-mining service, has announced it is shutting down operations next month, saying it can no longer make a profit.

Extensively used by bad actors to conduct cryptojacking campaigns, but also by legitimate users to make a buck in the cryptocurrency market, CoinHive has garnered mixed reviews, to say the least.

The business model is simple: Coinhive offers a JavaScript miner for the Monero blockchain that users can embed in in their website. Visitors to the website automatically turn into miners (ideally with their consent, but not always) and the script essentially hijacks their CPU to start mining Monero. The business model itself is legitimate, as it swaps ads for crypto-mining. But because hackers constantly find vulnerabilities in websites, they have used the tool to turn websites into mining machines for their own crypto-wallets. That”s not why CoinHive is shutting down though.

CoinHive explains the reasons for the shutdown in a short notice on its blog:

“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,” the team writes. “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 [sic] us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive.”

Mining with CoinHive will remain operable until March 8, or just over a week from now. Customers will be able to access their CoinHive dashboards and withdraw their funds until April 30.