Japan SBI Halts Mining in Russia

The biggest online brokerage firm in Japan, SBI Holdings, has placed a partial termination on its crypto mining activities in Russia while referring to the crypto winter and geopolitical insecurity. The mining operations were suspended by the platform in Siberia (the mining-rich zone of the country). The reasons provided by the venue were the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as well as the current bear market, as reported by Bloomberg on Thursday.

Japan SBI Holdings Inc. Stops Crypto Mining in Russia and Undergoes Losses

The termination of the mining operations was witnessed just after the start of a military intervention initiated by Russia in Ukraine on 24th February, as the platform’s spokesperson reportedly mentioned. The stop put on the business of SBI regarding crypto assets paved the way toward a loss of approximately 9.7B yen ($71M) in this year’s 2nd quarter. As a consequence, the net losses of the venue touched an amount of 2.4B yen (roughly $17.5M), reportedly its initial quarterly loss during a decade.

The reports dealing with the mining suspensions of SBI in Siberia resemble the public mining data of SBI Crypto (the crypto mining sub-branch of SBI). As per the data taken from BTC.com (a blockchain explorer), the hash rate of mining under SBI Crypto declined by 40% to reach 3,300 petahashes per second (PH/S) on 18th August – from the figure of 5,600 PH/S which was witnessed on February’s mid.

Platform Still Wants to Run SBI Bank in Russia, Says a Spokesperson

Following the closure of a few mining operations within Siberia, it is reported that the company is even now carrying out mining activity within the country. Formerly this week, Hideyuki Katsuchi (the chief financial officer of SBI) reportedly pointed out the strategy of the firm to trade the hardware related to crypto mining and pull back from the country altogether. Nonetheless, a resolute decision has not been finalized by SBI regarding the exact date when the respective procedure will take place.

A spokesperson asserted that the platform does not have any other activity in Russia, and it plans to keep running the commercial banking entity thereof – SBI Bank – in Moscow. It was formerly reported that Russia secured a position among the world’s largest countries sheltering crypto mining operations in the previous year. It turned into the 3rd biggest producer of hash rates for Bitcoin following the United States as well as Kazakhstan.