Last Wednesday, NortonLifelock — formerly known as Symantec — announced that it is adding an Ethereum mining feature to its paid antivirus product, Norton 360.
It’s not very common for an Antivirus suite to offer the ability to mine cryptocurrencies, but Norton 360 gives it as an option. The logic of Norton 360 is to offer a safe way to anyone who wants to get their hands on some cryptocurrencies.
The creators of the security applications suite point out that many times those involved in cryptocurrency mining end up running malware on their computer and simply doing damage without collecting profits. Thus, Norton 360 offers a safe environment for the user to engage in cryptocurrency mining without worrying about potential risks.
The program, as it works steadily ”behind the scenes” on the computer, also mines Ethereum and stores the results, not on a hard drive locally that can be damaged, but directly to the user’s Norton Cloud account. Gradually, all users of Norton software will have this feature in the next few weeks.
Here’s The Catch
However, the operation will not be free.
The company plans to charge a coin mining fee for each participant.
Users will also have to pay if they want to transfer their Ethereum to another wallet.
The other issue is how the Ethereum community is working to phase out intensive GPU mining in the coming months. Therefore, the operation can be short-lived, although Norton could migrate mining to another cryptocurrency.
The cryptocurrency economy may be in crisis lately, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t those who see opportunities in crisis.