Coinhive will shut down its cryptomining service in March

Coinhive, the in-browser Monero mining firm, announced in a blog post that it would discontinue its services starting March 8. The firm cites dropping hash rates from the recent Monero hard fork and monero's crashing price as the reasons it is shutting down. Coinhive users have until April 30 to withdraw their mining balances.

Coinhive initially launched as an alternative to banner ads. Website owners can integrate Coinhive's mining software to use their visitors' CPU power to mine monero. However, hackers and cyber-criminals soon realized that they could hack popular websites and insert Coinhive's code to mine monero without their victim's knowledge. A November 2017 Check Point report claimed that Coinhive was the sixth most-used malware by cyber-criminals.