CoinHive cryptomining services are closing down

CoinHive, the infamous in-browser crypto mining service is counting its last days, due to the massive drop in the hash rate as well as the decrease of the market value of their targeted cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) within the last year. As it was reported on the official Coinhive’s blog, after a careful consideration the company is shutting down all services the next week on March 8, 2019, while keeping user dashboards available until April 30, 2019.

Although recent statistics were showing how cryptocurrency miners are becoming a new craze, pushing the old, worn out viruses out from the malware market, it seems like this was just a temporary trend and generating virtual money is not that economically beneficial anymore.

The controversial Monero mining JavaScipt-based service, CoinHive, released its Official farewell on 26th of February, 2019, reporting that the project is being discontinued in March, because of the gradual value fall-off caused by a hard fork of Monero in October.

Some of you might have anticipated this, some of you will be surprised. The decision has been made. We will discontinue our service on March 8, 2019. 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. 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 us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive.

Monero changed algorithms, which were supposed to benefit cryptocurrency holders, and antivirus services increasing their security () seem to be the last straw in CoinHive’s activities, as some of the users were already predicting. But this goodbye may not be a bad thing.

Even though CoinHive was a legitimate XMR mining service, that anyone could embed it into their websites, so that the visitors in exchange for the content or other benefits, would allow the domain owner to use their device or computer power to mine Monero, it became quickly abused and the code of CoinHive was implemented as a part of many crypto jacking campaigns. The situation got so bad that once users were visiting code injected websites, their browsers would freeze, draining all the battery and , which drove security companies to begin blocking CoinHive codes.

Coinhive shutting down will definitely save tons of users and their machines from generating virtual currency to hackers at the cost of their electricity bills, but at the same time this will drive crooks to look for other ways of income, which can result in a spike of other malware releases. While there is not much anyone can do about it, make sure to be step ahead and get yourself a reputable antivirus.