By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
The sudden rising craze around farming the Chia coin has resulted in massive demand for SSD and enterprise-grade storage hard drives. This has further pushed the surge in the price of these hard drives by 50-60%.
Recently, there’s a lot of buzz around a new green cryptocurrency dubbed Chia, especially in China. The Chia coin has stirred up a major frenzy within Chinese miners. The Chia coin is now all set to go live for trading later ahead today on May 3, at 10 AM PDT on the official platform.
Start of Chia Trading
Also, the Chia Network IOU has been listed on Gate.io and all trading transactions will happen on this platform. All Chia tokens are currently in their pre-minting phase. Moreover, of the 21410,000 Chia Tokens (XCH) total supply, the team controls 21000,000 tokens and the rest are minted.
Created by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen, Chia coins use the combination of “proofs of space and time” for “farming” instead of “mining”. This makes it less energy-intensive in comparison to other “proof of work” models like Bitcoin (BTC). Chia Network, the company behind Chia coins has attracted significant attention from investors.
Some of the biggest names in investing world and popular VC funds like Naval Ravikant, Andressen Horowitz, and Cypherpunk Holdings have backed this project. Besides, publicly traded crypto mining companies like iMD have shown interest in Chia. Rick Wilson, iMD CEO recently said:
“We’re going all-in on Chia’s. With our extensive research we believe that Chia is here to stay and will be utilized on a global financial level. We believe our early decision to farm Chia will result in increased revenues for iMD.”
Chia’s Proof of Space and Time Model
As said, the entire Chia network and its native cryptocurrency rely on the Proof of Space and Time model. The Chia coin users called “farmers” will “seed” the storage devices or SSDs with software having cryptographic numbers put into specific plots.
From the Chia blockchain network, these “plots” are awarded along with blocks. It depends upon the percentage of total space the farmer has contributed in comparison to the entire network. Later, a VDF server called “timelord” verifies the block thereby allowing the chain to move forward while simultaneously awarding Chia coins to them.
Chia network developers say that the system cuts down on energy costs compared to the Proof-of-Work Bitcoin blockchain. Besides, it also claims better security than the Ethereum blockchain. Although the Chia model is an energy saver, it is still causing problems for hard drive storage and SSD manufacturers.
The craze around the Chia coin has led to a massive demand of SSDs and hard drives. Several models of enterprise-grade SSDs are out of stock on Chinese e-commerce platforms like JD.com and Alibaba. This has also led to a significant surge around 50% in the price of SSDs.
For e.g. before April 14, Alibaba‘s Taobao listed an 8 TB hard drive for 1150 Yuan. The same is now available for 2160 Yuan. However, SSD maker Galax has warned users about mining cryptocurrencies that require excessive volume and speed of storage. Just a requirement can possibly void the guarantee of its SSDs, said Galax.