PROHASHING Closing To Protect Customers In Response to UBMI Lawsuit

Introduction

It is with a sad heart that PROHASHING is announcing its closure towards the end of 2025.

As many are aware, PROHASHING was recently sued by United Brands and Marketing International (UBMI), a Luxembourg company. The lawsuit was filed within the same month as PROHASHING's owners, Steve and Chris, were personally sued in an adversary proceeding in New York and when other litigation was started against them personally.

UBMI has stated “upon information and belief” that PROHASHING defrauded it of more than $2 million between 4 and 8 years ago, but did not provide its username in its complaint. The statute of limitations for fraud in Pennsylvania is two years. UBMI, which is represented by Bull Blockchain Law, has not attached the terms of service it claims were violated. Most importantly for customers, UBMI claims it cannot determine how much money PROHASHING owes it without an examination of PROHASHING’s internal database. US law permits any plaintiff with a "plausible" case – and that bar is very low - to obtain access to a company’s records through discovery.

Both Chris and Steve have testified under penalty of perjury that they had never heard of UBMI before the lawsuit was filed, and also that no evidence of a power of attorney that UBMI states was sent/received by PROHASHING was found in any of PROHASHING’s databases. For those interested, a timeline of coincidental events is available in “Argument 2” at https://stevesokolowski.com/sokolowski-v-fraud/#ap-pi-opposition-brief.

While PROHASHING categorically denies all of UBMI’s allegations, PROHASHING is a small business which, as a direct result of being defrauded by Digital Currency Group, its CEO Barry Silbert, and Genesis CEO Michael Moro in 2022, was forced to lay off its employees and which cannot afford the cost of legal fees to take the case to trial against UBMI and Bull. These legal fees defending against UBMI and Bull may reach into many hundreds of thousands of dollars, which are currently exceeding PROHASHING’s profitability and are projected to exhaust PROHASHING’s remaining reserve next year.

PROHASHING cannot simply settle with UBMI and Bull for whatever they ask. If we paid money to anyone who filed a case at a convenient time, PROHASHING would just be right back where it started, with another frivolous plaintiff learning about the previous payday, seeking a new settlement, and trying to obtain your data again. But we can’t afford to fight either, and we would gain new customers during that period whose privacy would then be at risk. And, we have already paid more than $25,000 in this litigation, with legal fees eliminating our reserve every month.

As a result, the only way we believe we are able to protect our customers is to begin an orderly wind down process.

Customer protection

Our goal in initiating the wind down process now while time remains is threefold:

1. To protect customers' data to the greatest extent possible,
2. To wind down while plenty of time is available so that everyone is able to migrate their mining equipment without losing money due to equipment suddenly becoming idle,
3. To make sure everyone is paid in full.

PROHASHING has more than enough money to continue operating for many months and to pay customers, and payouts will be made during the ordinary course of business. For now, there are no changes; we are simply following PROHASHING’s terms of service, which state that customers will be notified at least 30 days before any closure.

Important dates

October 20, 2025: This announcement was posted.

November 15, 2025: Mining services will be shut down across all regions. After this date, mining rigs that haven’t been transferred to another pool will be disconnected.

November 20, 2025: This is the final date that customers may enter payout addresses to be paid through PROHASHING’s standard payout system.

November 21, 2025 – December 2, 2025: Final payouts will be processed to all customers who have entered payout addresses as part of the ordinary course of business. It is possible that due to the volume of payouts and work hours required, some payouts that would normally be paid between November 15 and 20 might be paid during this later period instead. We cannot guarantee full payment to any customer who has not entered a payout address and tax information on or before November 20, 2025.

Late 2025 or early 2026: After final accounting has been performed, all money in PROHASHING’s possession will be liquidated to US dollars.

January 31, 2026: Final tax forms (1099 forms and others) will be mailed to customers.

March 2, 2026: This is the final date that we guarantee that the prohashing.com site and domain will remain online and available. At some time after this date, all servers will be shut down and may not remain in our possession. This notice has been posted at a different domain so it will survive the shutdown.

Other notes

During the shutdown period, Chris will continue to provide support to all customers as normal, and mining will continue until November 15. Feel free to contact him using normal support channels if you have any questions. You will not notice any changes to the system until mining stops, other than notices to ensure payout addresses are entered.

If a support ticket submitted in September 2025 or earlier was not addressed by Chris, feel free to resubmit it; a mail server outage missed a few tickets at one point. Tickets submitted after should not be resubmitted.

We have disabled all features that allow customers to delete data, as we are now legally prohibited from doing so, even in response to a support ticket. Any data you enter into the system may be discovered by external parties.

Most older balances that remain unpaid are because the customer has failed to enter tax information. We expect hacking attempts and fraud during the wind down period, and reserve the right to require identity verification for large payments of older balances. We will attempt to protect this information as best we can.

Customers who fail to enter payout addresses before the November 20 deadline may file a claim for US dollars through the claims protocol in any Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceeding, should a bankruptcy petition be filed.

Our primary goal is to protect customer data throughout the UBMI litigation as much as possible. However, should a bankruptcy petition become necessary at some point, the UBMI litigation would be stayed and PROHASHING will be required by law to provide all customer data to the US Trustee, who would also have the authority to abandon PROHASHING’s 100TB mining database and conduct an investigation into the circumstances that caused PROHASHING’s closure for the benefit of the estate’s unsecured creditors’ committee.

Conclusion

We know that many loyal customers have valued PROHASHING throughout the past 12 years and we are sorry to have to make this sudden announcement. We thank the many employees who poured their lives into PROHASHING throughout the last decade, and it is a sad day to see their work go to waste. We had hoped to use AI models to supercharge PROHASHING and automate its backend to dramatically improve profitability next year, as well as to use AI LLM agents to monitor the pool as that technology became available, so we recognize that this development is a huge disappointment to PROHASHING fans and the downstream companies that have come to rely on PROHASHING’s products.

We know that you expected your data at PROHASHING to remain secure, and we have never lost any data to hacks. Our goal in the coming years of litigation will be to protect our customers as much as we can.

If we can afford to do so, we intend to win the UBMI lawsuit on the merits. Additionally, should any discovered evidence in any forum support such an action, we will seek to hold anyone found responsible for the closure of PROHASHING personally liable to the fullest extent of the law - for the profits from the future AI profitability enhancements, and expansion plans that have now been ruined. If a coordinated scheme were to be proven, then all participants in any part of that scheme, even if they did not directly work on the PROHASHING part of the plan, would be jointly liable.

Feel free to contact Chris through the normal support channels if you have any questions, and enjoy the next month of mining!

We are committed to fighting the fight for you, and will keep your data safe for as long as it takes.

Happy mining from wherever it comes,

-PROHASHING staff