It seems like they're holding funds from all official mining pools so they can sift ETN to pay ICO investors? Unlike ERC20 Tokens which can be issued with ease to ICO investors, Electroneum decided to use a fork of Monero which is based on Cryptonote tech, which means you cannot issue tokens, you have to mine them. I understand they pre-mined like 9 billion though? Or did they fuck up their pre-mine?
Maybe they fucked up with the pre-mine and are holding all official mining pools in order to pay ICO holders? Who knows I'm just being speculative here, but it's very odd that all official mining pools have stopped paying out miners, not to mention the ridiculous 4% mining fee! Should be max 2%.
It's highly unlikely because the amount of coins mined in those 10-12 hours would be just a fraction of the ICO coins.
I've been occasionally mining for a few years so I've seen this before - when a pool is mining and shows no blocks found - that's some kind of a glitch in a billing service, I guess.
I've also seen it many times when a team behind the pool was able to recover those blocks manually and issue payouts.
But that's when there are developers behind a pool who are interested in having a good reputation and to keep their pool running.
With Electroneum there may be a chance that the Dev team just simply abandoned their pools (they stated at the very beginning that they have no interest in creating the pools and they want to have more pools created by community).
What bugs me the most is that why a team who raised $40 mln in funds wasn't capable of hiring a middle level Linux admin/developer who could do the job for a few thousands bucks?
I wish I am wrong, but this thought seems to be very logical to me. With that kind of budget there shouldn't be any shortage in team's skills set.