Bitmain Is Now Part Of The 21 Entities Providing EOS Transactions

Bitmain has joined the 21 entities that provide transactions on the emerging EOS network.

The China-based firm, popularly known for providing cryptocurrency mining hardware and promoting a big-block approach to Bitcoin scaling, received enough number of votes to become an active EOS block producer on Tuesday, which makes it possible to receive compensation for processing transactions and applying the network’s constitution.

Bitmain’s block producer candidate, EOS AntPool is operated by AntPool, one of Bitmain’s two large mining pool subsidiaries. Bitmain also supported a $3 million funding round for ViaBTC, which runs a moderately-sized mining pool, in 2017.

As a whole, these three pools result for over 50 percent of BTC blocks mined in the past seven days, and this level of centralization is one reason that Bitmain has become a flashpoint in several cryptocurrency circles.

There is adequate debate regarding the extent which pooled hashpower interprets into actual “control” of the bitcoin mining landscape, although the fact that pool users must develop block headers using templates offered by pool operators has resulted to one core developer proposing replacing Stratum with an upgraded mining protocol and others to call for a radical change to Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm.