TOKYO – The 20,000 petahashes disappear on July 31.
That is the computing power behind SBI Crypto’s Bitcoin mining pool – roughly 2 percent of the entire global network, the equivalent of what a dozen separate industrial mining operations might take years to assemble – and it needs a new home within weeks. Japan’s largest diversified financial services group announced Thursday it is shutting down the pool it has operated since 2021, giving customers a single month to redirect their hardware before the final payout cutoff.
SBI Crypto, the digital asset arm of SBI Holdings, launched the pool in March 2021 with approximately 1.1 exahashes per second of its own processing power. By Thursday’s announcement, it had grown to 20,412 petahashes per second – roughly 2.24 percent of Bitcoin’s total network hashrate, ranking around 12th globally behind market leaders Foundry USA and AntPool. SBI started its mining operations in 2017, making the unit one of the longer-running corporate mining programs in Asia.
The company gave no reason for the closure. What it gave was a timeline: miners may continue submitting shares until 07:00 JST on July 31 – 22:00 UTC on July 30 – after which the pool stops accepting contributions and calculates final payouts. SBI Crypto directed users toward three alternative operators: Braiins, Luxor Pool, and NeoPool, noting those firms may offer special programs or preferential conditions for migrating customers, though it stopped short of formally endorsing any of them.
“On behalf of everyone at SBI Crypto, we sincerely thank you for your trust and support over the years,” CEO Hiroaki Morita said in the shutdown notice, sending off five years of operations in a single sentence.
The exit from mining comes as SBI Holdings reshapes itself into something considerably more ambitious in the crypto space than a pool operator. In June, the company agreed to acquire Bitbank, one of Japan’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, for approximately 46.7 billion yen ($289 million) – a deal that, when combined with SBI’s existing VC Trade platform, would give the group approximately 2.92 million crypto accounts and around 1.1 trillion yen in customer assets under custody, making it Japan’s largest regulated crypto exchange operator. The Japan Fair Trade Commission review is expected to conclude before an October closing target.
The exchange acquisition was only part of the pivot. On the same day it announced the Bitbank deal, SBI launched JPYSC, described as Japan’s first trust bank-backed yen stablecoin. The group also completed a co-launch of Ripple’s RLUSD dollar stablecoin in Japan – a project tied to SBI’s longstanding Ripple partnership dating to 2016. Steve Payne, co-founder and partner at Architect Partners, told CoinDesk the purchase represents a bet on regulated scale rather than immediate earnings, as Japan’s stricter compliance requirements are making standalone exchange operations increasingly untenable for smaller operators.
That strategic line – from mining pool to stablecoin issuer and exchange operator – reflects a calculation playing out across the global Bitcoin mining industry. Bitcoin’s price has fallen more than 50 percent from the all-time high it set in October 2025, compressing margins for pool operators who depend on the token’s value to cover hardware and energy costs. The April 2024 halving cut block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, leaving operators with roughly half the per-block revenue against the same or higher operational costs. Some larger buyers, including Strategy, have continued accumulating despite the drawdown, while others are converting data center capacity to AI workloads instead.
SBI also added merged mining – allowing the pool to simultaneously mine Litecoin and Dogecoin using the same SHA-256 hardware – in July 2023. The pool briefly suspended that merged mining support before the full shutdown notice arrived, a sign internal reviews had begun months before the public announcement. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT identified indicators consistent with North Korean state-sponsored activity in a $21 million hack that struck SBI Crypto in September 2025, an incident the company has not publicly connected to the mining pool’s closure.
Meanwhile, Tokyo-listed Metaplanet this week bought another $170.7 million in Bitcoin, pushing its treasury to 43,000 BTC and cementing its place as the world’s third-largest publicly traded Bitcoin holder. The divergence between SBI’s exit from mining and Metaplanet’s ongoing accumulation illustrates that Japanese institutional players are reaching very different conclusions about where value in the Bitcoin ecosystem sits.
What remains unclear: whether SBI attempted to sell the pool business before choosing to wind it down; whether the underlying mining hardware will be redeployed within the group’s other operations; and how many individual miners are affected and must find alternatives before July 31. The company has not said.
For the Bitcoin network, the redistribution of roughly 2 percent of hashrate will be absorbed. Pool dynamics shift constantly, and 20,000 petahashes tends to find buyers. What SBI’s exit signals, more than any hashrate fluctuation, is how Japan’s most aggressive financial institution in the crypto space has decided that the game worth playing now is not generating blocks – it is operating the infrastructure that miners, traders, and stablecoin users plug into.
