We have issued our second, third, and fourth bans in the pool's history.
However, the situation is not entirely straightforward this time.
We recently encountered an issue involving a significant statistical deviation in block-solving effort. Upon analysis, we identified the users responsible as vasiliinorris, iKgqP2NGLB7AMG4ehTHtSDahsd7ckcGL, and hT6BJPLm7CVmPLWE75kt8sGn6T3q7EWt. Initially, we suspected a share-withholding attack—where an attacker selectively withholds solutions that solve the block (or submits only a portion of them). However, a deeper investigation into the statistics revealed that the issue is most likely a firmware bug.
We ask the users with the aforementioned usernames to contact us as soon as possible—via any available channel—to clarify their custom firmware version and to arrange for the unblocking of their accounts and the release of their account balances. Access to the pool from these accounts will remain suspended until we have discussed this matter.
To prevent similar situations in the future, we have developed a specialized detector for these statistical deviations and implemented hardware fingerprint analysis. If a matching fingerprint is detected, the hardware will be immediately disconnected from the pool. Furthermore, any user connecting hardware with this specific firmware will be automatically banned, with account restoration possible only through our support team.
We will let you know later what this firmware is, as soon as we receive a response from the users with the specified usernames.