AntPool stated: “As ETH2.0 (The Merge) comes along with the risk of censorship among different countries, ANTPOOL, for the sake of clients’ asset security, will not be able to maintain the user's ETH assets on the PoS chain.”
The mining spinoff of Bitmain, AntPool, has stated that it will stop maintaining clients' assets on Ethereum after the network upgrades to proof-of-stake next month in The Merge.
The Merge will turn Ethereum from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) network to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS), eliminating the need for miners to verify transactions.
The company stated in a blog post published on Saturday that it will be unable to keep clients' assets on the Ethereum 2.0 network and revealed a plan to settle with them before The Merge.
AntPool is an Ethereum mining pool in which multiple users can plug in their computational resources and share processing power to mine rewards. AntPool deposits mining rewards into users' accounts.
The decision to discontinue maintenance of individual client assets following Ethereum's PoS upgrade is attributable to the "risk of censorship." This is due to growing concerns that Ethereum validators may be coerced into censoring transactions related to US sanctions on Tornado Cash.
According to AntPool,
“As ETH2.0 (The Merge) comes along with the risk of censorship among different countries, ANTPOOL, for the sake of clients’ asset security, will not be able to maintain the user's ETH assets on the PoS chain.”
After Ethereum's upgrade, validators will process network transactions. On the other hand, validators are subject to staking providers. For instance, US-based providers such as Lido Finance, Coinbase, Bitcoin Suisse, Kraken, and Staked.us control roughly 60% of the Ethereum network's 416,000 validator nodes.
If staking validators consent to adhere to US sanctions, they can begin filtering Tornado Cash transactions on the base layer. It remains to be seen whether such censorship will occur as Ethereum transitions to PoS.
However, AntPool has requested that its clients add their private addresses to their accounts by September 3. The accumulated PoW mining payouts will then be distributed to the private addresses by the company.
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