Coinhive Mines 1.18% of Monero (XMR) Coins Monthly

Coinhive, a Java-based web script that utilizes the computing power of website visitors to mine cryptocurrencies, is responsible for 1,271, or 1.18%, of the Monero (XMR) coins mined in a month. This finding comes from research conducted by the RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

The study, executed by a team of experts in communication and distributed systems, revealed that Coinhive generated Monero coins worth approximately $250,000 over a four-week period this past spring. To facilitate their research, the authors developed a new fingerprinting method designed to identify mining code, examining a collection of .com, .net, and .org domains as well as the top 1 million websites according to Alexa rankings.

The fingerprinting technique uncovered that widely-used tools for detecting sites utilizing Coinhive code, such as NoCoin block lists, are ineffective in 82% of cases.

Coinhive was introduced last year with the aim of providing a way for website owners to monetize their sites by leveraging their visitors’ unused processing power.