The Coinhive cryptomining mining service which was designed to offer web developers a JavaScript-based Monero miner announced that it will discontinue its services on March 8, 2019.
For developers, Coinhive is a JavaScript library designed to be loaded within a web app and allowing the website owner to use the CPU resources available on visitors’ computers to mine for Monero (XMR).
As detailed in Coinhive’s announcement:
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.
Among the reasons behind the services shutdown, Coinhive mentions the last Monero hard fork which lead to a 50% decrease in hash rate and the YoY depreciation of the XMR cryptocoin:
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.
Coinhive also stated that, while all mining operations will be automatically halted after March 8, the service dashboard will still be operational allowing for transfers of cryptocurrency:
Thus, mining will not be operable anymore after March 8, 2019.
Your dashboards will still be accessible until April 30, 2019 so you will be able to initiate your payouts if your balance is above the minimum payout threshold.
Thank you all for the great time we had together.
While Coinhive’s operators mention having a great time since the service went live until their shutdown announcement, not everyone would agree considering its extensive use in large scale cryptojacking operations.
Coinhive-powered cryptojacking campaigns also shutting down Cryptojacking campaigns hijack the CPU resources of visitors landing on legitimate websites that got compromised and had the Coinhive JavaScript miner embedded within by the cybercriminals behind the campaign.
The cryptojacking technique is also extensively used in malware campaigns which drop a Coinhive-based miner on compromised machines as part of a multi-stage infection.
As a witness to the scale of the cryptojacking problem, researchers found that Coinhive was making around $250,000 each month in Monero at one point in time, and had “a 62% share of all websites using a JavaScript cryptocurrency miner” according to researcher Troy Mursch .
Additionally, Coinhive-powered cryptojacking campaigns expanded to the Google Play Store and also targeted vulnerable MikroTik routers , successfully infecting 200,000 of them in multiple campaigns.
Cryptojacking campaigns also led to people getting arrested after deploying malicious Coinhive miners on thousands of Internet cafe computers from 30 Chinese cities and even sentenced for running illicit mining operations on other users’ computers and making a measly $45.
The good news is that, with the shutdown of Coinhive, cryptojacking campaigns will also have to stop. That is until the malicious actors behind them switch to another JavaScript in-browser cryptomining library designed as a Coinhive alternative.
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