MINEXMR, the largest Monero Mining Pool that currently controls about 40% of Monero's total network hashrate at the time of writing this article, announced that it will be shutting down on August 12th, ahead of the scheduled August 13 Monero Network Upgrade. MINEXMR has recently accounted for up to 48% of the global total hashrate, leading to many in the Monero community warning that the pool threatens the network's decentralization and could theoretically someday initiate a 51% attack, which could lead to double-spend instances and re-organization of the blockchain. 

On MINEXMR's website, the team recommends users of the pool to transition to P2Pool, a fee-less decentralized mining pool. Users who have pending mining income on the pool will automatically receive their payments following the closure of MINEXMR. MINEXMR did not state on the website why the platform is shutting down, but users and community members suspect that a combination of criticism for hinder decentralization alongside government crackdowns on privacy-based cryptocurrencies may be factors. 

In the past, members of the Monero community have criticized MINEXMR in fear that the pool's size threatens decentralization, and previously, administrators of the pool raised fees from 1% to 1.1% in an attempt to disincentive some users from using the pool. However, based on the pool's hashrate, some members of the Monero community say that the attempt made minimal impact to help decentralize the network.  

The closure of MINEXMR, among the longest-lived XMR pools, means that Nanopool and SupportXMR, which control roughly 15% and 14% of the global Monero hashrate, will likely become the largest pools on the network. 

Note: The first image used in this article was a screenshot from MINEXMR's website while the second image was from the public domain, and may be used for commercial purposes without citation or other attribution.