On August 30th, the platform responsible for 21% of the recently mined Bitcoins, announced that it also begins working with Ethereum and is opening a mining pool for the leading altcoin.
The Ethereum pool will support Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). Furthermore, users will be able to increase their income by going from one crypto to the other.
Zhuang Zhong, Chief Executive Officer of BTC.com, explained that smart contracts are charged according to the executed code. Miners receive rewards for hashes through the GHOST protocol (Greedy Heaviest Observed Subtree). Ethereum allows various reward incentives for giving hash power to the network.
The decision comes with a future prognosis that Ethereum mining will leap over 12% of the total hash rate in the next two months. The owner of the BTC.com platform is the company Bitmain - better known in the crypto world as the manufacturer of the ASIC mining hardware.
In April this year, Ethereum ASIC mining hardware made an entrance on the crypto mining market. That has led to debates in the cryptocurrency community as to whether Ethereum should fork to support ASIC resistance.
The team behind BTC.com said they are not concerned about the change of Ethereum‘s consensus algorithm, which until recently was the Proof of Work (POW) Ethash. The cryptocurrency developers team is planning a switch to Casper, a Proof of Stake (POS) consensus algorithm.
Finally, Zhuang Zhong added that mining is still possible with a Proof of Stake algorithm. Although it requires a different design, the platform has enough experience with Ethereum wallets and Smart contracts to supply such a pool.