Cloud mining service Genesis Mining is forcing some clients to upgrade to a five-year subscription or else lose services, it announced Thursday.

The Iceland-based startup said in a blog post that it will end open-ended contracts for customers who are not earning enough to cover maintenance fees in roughly two months due to the ongoing declining cryptocurrency market. Clients who wish to retain services must upgrade to a new premium account.

Mining is getting more complicated and energy-intensive, the company said, forcing it to reconsider its policies. Now, all users will have to switch to a five-year contract with no option for early termination. The fee for every trillion hashes per second (TH/s) will drop to $180 however, down from $285.

The company said:

“Unfortunately, bitcoin went into a downward trend around January. This trend combined with the heavily rising difficulty around April and May reduced mining outputs even further. As a result, some user contracts are now mining less than the daily maintenance fee requires to be covered, and thus they entered the 60 days grace period, after which open-ended contracts will get terminated.”

Nor is Genesis Mining the first firm to find mining for certain customers unprofitable – in June, Hashflare announced that it was shutting down its bitcoin mining operations and cancelling users’ contracts, because “the payouts were lower than maintenance for 28 consecutive days,” according to its official Facebook page.

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