Bitmain Sues Three Former Employees Who Founded Rival Mining Pool

Bitmain sues three ex-employees who founded the rival mining pool Pooling and now the company demands $4 million in damages. The latest cryptocurrency news will talk some more about their history.

Bitmain alleged that Poolin’s co-founders violated their non-compete agreements and founded the rival mining pool but according to the former employees, Bitmain failed to pay them as agreed. The crypto mining giant is now in a legal battle with the seventh-largest pool in the world. The three Poolin co-founders say that they are no longer bound to the agreement since Bitmain was the one that first broke it by not paying their compensation on time.

Bitmain makes most of the money from selling mining equipment according to the reports but it also operates mining pools which offered the miners the ability to split rewards. The service accounted for $43.2 million of the company’s revenues in the Q1 of 2018 compared to the $2.7 billion of the hardware sale in the same timeframe. The three co-founders filed lawsuits against Bitmain and so now the mining giant Bitmain sues in return claiming that they caused major losses to the company by going to a competing pool.

Bitmain asked the court to keep the non-compete agreement in action and not to set free the three Poolin executives. The dispute went unnoticed in the public but there was video footage recently where you can hear the two sides making their respective cases. The Poolin executives left Bitmain somewhere in the middle of 2017 since Bitmain wouldn’t pay them. Under the non-compete agreement, Bitmain should have paid monthly compensation to one of the founders of about $2,780 and in return, he shouldn’t have had operated another mining pool.  After their departure, Pan, Zhu, and Li launched Poolin as a mining pool for multiple cryptocurrencies in 2017 in November and in July 2018 they mined the first bitcoin block.

As reported in the coming altcoin news, Poolin became one of the largest bitcoin mining pools since it has the third biggest operation by the hash rate in the world right after BTC.com and AntPool. Miners that are connected to Poolin managed to mine about 26,825 bitcoins.