Frequently Asked Questions

A collection of commonly asked questions and answers collected from across the community to supplement the official Chia Network FAQ and the Chia blockchain software FAQ.

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Chia Network AMAs
FAQs

Chia Network AMAs

The Chia Network team hosts regular AMAs (Ask me Anything) for the community. Here are (paraphrased or quoted) answers to questions that come up often categorized by topic.

Initial Public Offering (IPO)

When is the IPO?

“When everyone asks me ‘when IPO’ the answer is We really can’t talk about ‘when IPO’ until we can. So I apologize that I can’t give people more guidance than that but I can say that we remain on an accelerated timeline to go public.”
Gene Hoffman, February 2022 AMA

Is Chia Network still on the same timelines that we were on last year after the last capital raise? Do we anticipate another funding round?

“I would point out, without giving too much details, that in fact this model was built and we are actually slightly behind our model from a cash spend perspective. So you know, we very much knew that we would have to grow the company very drastically starting with May 3. Remember we’ve raised publicly $61M, if you read the whitepaper there’s even more than that, that was raised in the May-ish last year time frame. We remain on plan if a little under which has been great as it allows us do certain things that are one-offs. We remain on an accelerated timeline to go public as we’ve talked about and we expect there will be a financing component of that.”
Gene Hoffman, May 2022 AMA

“The far more important question is where are we on an offering. When we last got together like this I was say we’re on a dual track and we were thinking it was leaning slightly SPAC, I’ll that you that since with the market meltdown and us not melting down in the same way and some other market feedback I think we’re fully back on the dual track. I’m quite comfortable with the fact that we’re at least going to be able to file shortly but the real issue out there is the macro environment. You know we cannot control inflation, the strength of the dollar, and the fact that right now nothing is going public. The average number of companies that go public in a month in the United States is usually in the hundreds and I think it’s in the single digits right now. So understand that the world is just kind of different but we do want to be in the right place when that right time comes which that’s harder to predict and so that’s kind of where we’re heading there. The other kind of hidden question that’s often kind of asked in there is “Hey are you guys going to run out of money?” and I’ll go ahead and preempt that with we have more than a year’s of cash at level of spend we’re at. We kind of overbudget and come in nicely under but still have room to grow. Allison is coming aboard and hiring folks and has a budget for example and that’s exactly where we want to be. We are certainly being a little more cautious just so you see people like Amazon and Apple being cautious even though they continue to see strong earnings and profits as we saw from Apple yesterday. We see this as an opportunity to expand the foothold we have and we have real resources to do it with that also means it’s been even easier to get more resources to do it with especially in the short term as we think about what the next 3/4 years look like.”
Gene Hoffman, July 2022 AMA

How will Chia take the company public? Will early farmers get access to the IPO?

“There are two primary ways that we’re likely to go public – there’s actually three ways but there’s only two that I think we’re likely to choose. One’s with what’s called a special purpose acquisition company or a SPAC. It’s still an IPO, it’s not an acquisition, people are confused about that. If we go that direction it’s much harder for us to do what Bram and I’d like to do to be able to get farmers in. But if we go for a more traditional S-1 route, we are hoping to be able to allow farmers to be able to buy shares at the offering price in the offering. And this would be with any brokerage account anywhere in the world so you know it’s a relatively easy way to access. We obviously cannot guarantee which one we’ll be doing just because market forces, timing, opportunity drive a lot of this but it’s certainly a factor in how we think about which one we do.”
Gene Hoffman, February 2022 AMA

“There are two different methods that we would most likely go public by – that would either be to merge with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) or to do an S-1. In the S-1 scenario, we would be able to potentially offer farmers that have farmed a block on the chain before a certain date the ability to buy at the IPO price. To the extent that we go with a SPAC it’s not as clean but you’ll be able to buy the SPAC’s trading equity before that merger’s complete which will let you get in basically at the same price as the effective go-public transaction occurs at. So decent odds we’ll be able to do one of those and that will be a pretty nice way for our farmers to get in at the go-public price. Obviously cannot guarantee it – there are some deal dynamics and the banks get in the situation a little bit but that is our hope and we very much like for people to be able to buy in to both the future of Chia Network Inc. and the prefarm themselves.”
Gene Hoffman, May 2022 AMA

Which stock exchange will the equity be listed on?

“We are absolutely aiming to have our equity be listed on either NYSE or Nasdaq here in the US. There’s also a process kind of afterwards where we may very well list that equity on things like the Nikkei or the London Stock Exchange but that will take a little more time afterwards.”
Gene Hoffman, February 2022 AMA

Is there a contingency if the SEC process fails for an IPO?

“There’s two different issues here right, there’s getting public because of market conditions and then there’s SEC final approval to go effective. These are two kind of different issues but in either case we’re going to make sure we have enough capital to ride out a longer period with the SEC because I do think we’re going to be exciting, in a good way, and that often means they spend extra time looking at it and I’m okay with that and we expect that to go well but I want to make sure we budget for it. The ultimate backup is the private equity markets are pretty open to us so it’s relatively easy for us to raise up around from our previous round’s valuation if we needed to. I think the way I put it is that we potentially like to combine these two things into one, if something makes that not happen we take some additional capital and come back as the market gets better. Though I will say our feedback is that we may be an unique and interesting enough opportunity to be able to get through a nasty market.”
Gene Hoffman, May 2022 AMA

Prefarm

What is the purpose of the 21M XCH prefarm?

“The use of the pre farm is to reward shareholders and developers in a delayed way over a long time horizon. Note that when the pre farm becomes a reward to shareholders, everyone will also have a chance to be a shareholder. The simple economics in 10 years is that 1/2 of the coins go to farmers, 1/4 to early investors, and 1/4 to the team - but all after it’s a public company where the 1/2 of claims to the pre farm will have traded as public equity from willing sellers to willing buyers. This allows us to put all the dilution of value from raising fiat money to fund development on the investors and team and not on the farmers. I estimate that this project will end up needing to raise somewhere between $2 billion and $10 billion of fiat in its lifetime to fund development, go to market, and ecosystem development. We’re trying to build something larger than the linux ecosystem. Luckily we have this well tested technology called a Delaware corporation with HQ in California with employees around the world that will become a publicly traded company around the world.”
Gene Hoffman, March 2022 Reddit AMA

“The purpose of the 21M prefarm Chia is to make it very easy for us to raise fiat capital, to pay developers and everybody you’re seeing on this call and all the people we can pull out of the community, as well as to pay out grants to continue to build our developer relations team … and so the goal here is part of the public company strategy. If you’ve never been close to a public company it may not make as much sense but public companies can raise money once public very easily. And so fundamentally what the prefarm ends up being is this long term asset, and the way the company’s valuation is built is that asset plus the future of our cash flows from revenue from the business. And so if you’re an investor you get two things: you get coin price, and you get the services business that we have to build around coin price to help people actually adopt. Ultimately as this market gets really rich and thick like where we are a top 5 cryptocurrency, we will start dividending those coins to shareholders. So like once a quarter, everyone who owns a share of stock might get 0.01 XCH. The idea here is that its a completely fair way to distribute it. Ultimately what this looks like is that at the 50-year mark or even the 30-year mark I think it is, 50% of the coins are out in farmer hands, 25% of the coins went to private investors and the investors that took us public, and 25% stayed with the team and the development folks here – it’s a pretty good way to do it, now ultimately what we’re going to be doing is drawing down that prefarm out via the shareholder base. And so if you think the prefarm is large and valuable, you should be a shareholder as soon as we get public because you’ll have a claim on it and you’ll start getting paid in it.”
Gene Hoffman, March 2022 Anniversary AMA

Will the prefarm be shared with VCs?

“The items of our investment documents that gave any sort of ability to get Chia was amended out with our most recent fundraise. There is now no way for our investors to get Chia (from the prefarm) until and unless we get public.”
Gene Hoffman, February 2022 AMA

How will the prefarm help Chia developers in the ecosystem?

Summary from February 2022 AMA
- Prefarm has allowed Chia Network to raise equity (fiat) to fund programs such as the Chia Cultivation Grant.
- After going public, the prefarm can directly fund things like the Developer Challenge.

When will the prefarm be locked into a custody solution?

(Gene) “As Bram put it, everybody in the crypto space is always looking for the next ponzi when really they should be looking for the next custody solution. We are going to be rolling the prefarm into our custody solution. We have been doing extensive testing and you can imagine why we’re doing that extensive testing. The tails are actually already in GitHub, there’s a public repo and I think we can try to find that and post it, link-wise. Point being, it’s out there. It’s not very user friendly, it’s very much for us at this point. But in the product roadmap we will be disclosing publicly here shortly, we are going to both be rolling that both into the core command line and later the GUI/UX the back half of the year so some of those pieces, not the whole thing, will be actually start to be available directly in the Chia wallet that’s downloadable. The nice part is that is, with those tools we are already publishing if you are a developer I think you can quickly see how we can do vaulting, custodying, rekeying, so it’s more than just like m of n signatures to spend, it’s also things like there’s a “break glass key” that can independently recall a transaction during a period of time. There’s some complexity in our custody around our 90 day timeline that most people probably will not have so there’s a little bit of custom business logic there but the rest of it is all very generalizable and very useful and really lets you kind of build a set of controls that make it so that even if you do have somebody who loses a key or leaves the company or the key is stolen, you can actually kind of rekey them out relatively easily with a larger quorum of the rest.”
(Bram) “The thing that’s a little custom and weird in it actually it’s not the 90 day thing because that’s in the parameters you can twiddle those numbers straight forward and other people want the numbers different for whatever reason. But the thing that’s kind of custom logic is that it has this absolute time lock in it and how quickly you can pull stuff out of it. That’s kind of weird because that’s set as just an absolute limit that cannot be violated with any other key or anything. We’re doing that to give people confidence that we literally physically cannot pull funds out faster than a certain particular rate from the whole thing. But functionality like that people might want for other things just along the lines of having a rate limited wallet where there’s a cold key that can pull stuff out quickly but the particular way that it’s put together in our custody solution is a little, that one part of it is a little bit bespoke so most people that want a productized version of it, the most simple instantiation of which is just a rekeyable multisig wallet will just kind of want the rate limit lock up just ripped out of it.”
Gene Hoffman and Bram Cohen, July 2022 AMA

Economy and Markets

Is there any news on wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) and wrapped Ethereum (wETH)?

“Our partner that we announced our stablecoin USDS is working on that. Stably has let us know that they’ve run into some speed bumps with their partner, PrimeTrust. From a technical point of view, they’re ready to go. In fact, I think this week they are doing internal dogfooding so it’s not technical limitation, there are some contractual things with their partner that has been holding us up. We’re a holding pattern as much as the community is waiting to hear back from Stably on where this is going.”
Paul Hainsworth, March 2022 Anniversary AMA

“So there’s a couple of fronts. One is our friends at Stably continue to work to support wrapped ETH and wrapped Bitcoin. They’ve got some diligence still with PrimeTrust to make that happen. Second piece is that we are actively in R&D mode around bringing bridges to Chia with primary use cases being on the ETH side of things – you can send ETH to the bridge and get wrapped ETH on the Chia side as a Chia Asset Token. There are several other assets that matter in that department too, including Bitcoin. That is an active and ongoing R&D project for us at the moment and as we get closer to release we will have more updates for the community.”
Paul Hainsworth, May 2022 AMA

When will Chia be listed on Binance/Coinbase/other exchange?

“If you ever want to ask when we’re going list on an exchange, the person to ask is that exchange… the issue is that there are real sensitivities around the various exchanges and pre-announcing with an exchange can be a very bad thing for everyone involved.”
Gene Hoffman, March 2022 Anniversary AMA

“As I’ve said before, Coinbase has publicly stated that they have considered and are considering Chia. As I’ve also said before all of our exchanges do not really let us comment on our engagement with them until after they announce they have listed or are going to list it. I will quote one fact to everyone to remind them that the head of product management for listing is now in jail as of this week so I’m sure listing over there has been a little um… interesting.”
Gene Hoffman, July 2022 AMA

What are the hurdles or reasons preventing more exchange listings?

“There are a multitude of exchanges with a variety of hurdles… some are logistical, some are financial, and many are indeed BLS2 related. Fun fact: a vast number of exchanges don’t actually do any self custody at all. They rely on a third party to hold all of the coins across all of the chains. There’s only about 3 or 4 big names out there who do that securely, so often 5 exchanges are in the dark on XCH because one custody provider lacks BLS G2 support.”
J Eckert, March 2022 Reddit AMA

How is the Chia Network planning to increase the price?

“Our firm belief is that if we focus on making decisions that are targeted at doing what is best for the Chia technology/chain itself, the Chia Ecosystem, and Chia Network the company that are all in alignment with our values and visions, then other factors, such as the coin price, will positively adjust to reflect those efforts. Because of that, we don’t sit down in the morning and say “what can we build/ship today that will make the coin price go up?”
J Eckert, March 2022 Reddit AMA

Is Chia Network in the ears of any US government officials regarding their research in blockchain issued by the President’s Executive Order (EO)?

“Oh are we! Obviously I was in D.C. in person for two days that was both White House, House, and Senate meetings. We’re really excited about the EO. The EO took what we think was a pretty good tone and position on what can happen here. Our message of a sustainable blockchain with real world use cases really resonates as both our friends and the White House figure out what their official blockchain policy is. I think you’re going to see a lot of real positives there. One of the things that we didn’t talk about as much is for example, the previous session we were very active on the Albany issues and obvious we’re there again this year. For those of you that ask about that, we’ve met with the sponsor, she is actually a statistician originally if I remember correctly – but anyway a mathematically backgrounded person – so totally understood the difference between Proof of Space and Time, Proof of Work, and Proof of Stake … we expect that the EO’s going to potentially be quite useful, we think that all levels of government are excited to talk about blockchains solving real world problems and ours is the ONLY blockchain out there solving real world problems – caveat cross border payments and store of value of Bitcoin.”
Gene Hoffman, May 2022 AMA

What are updates on Automated Market Makers (AMMs)? Have they ever been developed in a Coinset model?

“We generally think AMMs are a really important piece of infrastructure for the Chia ecosystem. The short answer is yes, coinset model AMMs have been developed – you’ll see Cardano talking about this. We don’t want to throw shade so we don’t want to talk about feedback on their AMM model. I can say there is an active project developing an AMM on Chia. It is confidential and we’re collaborating with them providing feedback, Bram is directly involved, so that work is ongoing but because it is not our AMM we can’t really disclose who it is at this time but it is actively ongoing. And there are really interesting problems to solve – some of those will be surfaced as CHiPs most likely coming from us, principally around how can you enable a singleton to aggregate transactions in a single block and that is a principal problem to solve with AMMs in a coinset model.”
Paul Hainsworth, May 2022 AMA

Upcoming features

What’s the deal with NoSSD and their plot compression claims? Will Chia include anything into the client?

(Gene) “We’d always been planning to have a new plot format that is substantially smaller. I will say that I think the answer is we are leaning towards them being correct because they’re actually starting to hit some of the theoretical maximums. We’re not yet ready to figure out exactly what we’re going to do to replicate because there is sort of an interplay between the different techniques. I will say however that we do have vast majority of that understood in-house and will continue to do a little more research. Because we only want to do one fundamental plot change, we’re going to try to take a little bit of time to pull all the various issues together and whatever we can learn from that as well there apparently is another project out there with something similar, to really kind of get to a nearly final minimum size. Important things to understand is that once you get towards this minimum size the returns on CPU go down very quickly, I’ll kind of leave that to Bram to talk about.”
(Bram) “So the way this theoretically works is that we’ve always known and we’ve talked about before how there are time-space tradeoffs that are available which sounds a little scary but due to the way our format works, it’s really not. So to drastically oversimplify, if you don’t use the trickery that we’re using for proofs of space, if you just do naive rainbow tables then you have very straightforward time-space tradeoffs where if you double the amount of CPU that you use, you halve the amount of space that you have so you double the amount of effective space that it looks like you have and then the whole thing just winds up basically descending into computation proof of work again because there’s no limit to the amount of space that you have by throwing more computational power at it. With what we’re doing it kind of acts like there’s half of it that’s compressible that way and half of it that’s not, which isn’t too bad because what winds up happening is that the half that’s compressible that way you can do 1000 iterations, like multiply the amount of computation by 1000, which is really still nothing for all practical purposes that’s deminimus. At that point you’ve taken half of that space and reduced it to 0.05% of the space. Further going another factor of 10 will make that 0.005% so the amount of marginal benefit you’re getting from throwing more CPU beyond a pretty nominal amount winds up going down very fast. Now likely it won’t be quite as clean as that but that’s the general flavor of what we expect out of how all the time-space tradeoffs work. We do have an implementation already that we put together of the time-space tradeoff – it is possible to do better than the one that we have right now, we put it in a pretty simple one that gets over 10% reduction in size already but it’s possible to be better so we’re continuing to work on it, we’re continuing to work on reverse engineering what’s out there and talking to other potential partners who tell us they have stuff and getting our ducks in a row to figure out exactly what it is we’re looking to release here.”
(Gene) “And to preempt a couple more questions, there will likely be both a new plotting tool upgraded version that gets here and probably a shrinking a tool because most of the techniques you can kind of do in C2 and actually shrink the existing files to have…”
(Bram) “We’ve also been for a while now we’ve been working on a shrinking tool which gets a few percent. The nature though of the improvements of what we’ve been working on is not time-space tradeoffs, it’s much more just universal benefit things and I think are mostly a creative to the other stuff that we’re doing so we’ll get that couple of percent on top of whatever shrinkage we get. But all these things are mostly compressible doing a passover of everything and mostly these things are basically getting rid of the first table or two, dramatically compressing them and leaving everything else for the most part completely identical to what it was before.”
(Gene) “And then the major impact ultimately will just be we have an old netspace constant and a new netspace constant once we’re complete with getting the vast this in, and out.”
Gene Hoffman and Bram Cohen, July 2022 AMA

What is the plot shrinkage/compression tool?

Summary from February 2022 AMA
- It’s not a top priority item, coming out after Chia 1.3.x
- About 3% shrinkage compared to current plots.
- Future plotters will plot directly to this format.
- There could be a further improvement to get another 0.5% of shrinkage – but could come with a dramatic speed improvement for plotting.
Summary from December 2021 AMA
- Purpose is to provide the most compressed plot format so there’s no advantage with proprietary tools.
- The plot compression tool is reasonably fast and does a single pass over existing plots.
- About 4% compression with straight forward compression things.
Summary from May 2022 AMA
- Still being worked on but has been deprioritized
- Unlikely to be delivered in 2022

When will Chia get hardware wallet support? How is BLS G2 support coming along?

“As we kind of expected, the hardware community has been implementing the ITF standard and getting it more complete. You know, we don’t have some news today but I can tell you that both the HSM side and the individual hardware wallet side – we’ll have some fun things happening in the next couple months.”
Gene Hoffman, February 2022 AMA

“… you should expect hardware support soon.”
Gene Hoffman, March 2022 Anniversary AMA

“We have been actively engaged with Ledger – we’re in their Slack, we’re aware of their engineering progress. Their latest is that they’ve told us they’re ready to merge but it has been a little while. I would encourage people in our community to also go in on the demand side and let Ledger know that you want Chia support. They are a demand driven like anybody in the ecosystem so if you pester them, that helps. So please let them know. On the engineering and product side we’re actively engaged. (Gene: it’s not just Ledger by the way.)”
Paul Hainsworth, May 2022 AMA

What is and isn’t an issue with BLS signatures?

“The BLS standard hasn’t been finalized yet as a standard. Previous versions of it have changed between them for kind of dumb reasons but what’s going to happen is that the final standard is just going to basically support all the old versions that have been gone through. So I spoke the people involved with it and that’s the resolution of it – that the final standard is going to say all these old things work. And this actually isn’t super material to us because there’s the Chia standard which is the way Chia works. We didn’t run the Chia blockchain format through a standards body, we don’t need anyone’s permission to do that but for potential compatibility and just cause it’s a good idea in particular for working with hardware, it’s good to have sign-off for what you’re doing from a standards body is kind of having this clear selling point for everyone else to interoperate with. But even if we actually were in total violation of the standard we would still continue with what we’re doing and it would still be supported but it would just be more of a headache on our part to get everyone to support it.”
Bram Cohen, March 2022 Anniversary AMA

What are details about “Project Asteroid” or the data layer?

“Still on track! We hope to have cool stuff to share about how this all works in the weeks or months to come, but for a lot of these we are tied not to our own time tables and milestones, but to those of outside entities so we just kind of have to wait until all the pieces fall into place around the parts we provided.”
J Eckert, March 2022 Reddit AMA

“Datalayer is already released - though only in a branch in chia-blockchain and not in say an installer or numbered release yet. Datalayer lets any group created a federated database between them. That group has some access control and can choose how open they are. The CW is going to be fully open as to the contents of their database but will generally only allow in nations and well known voluntary carbon registries for write access.”
Gene Hoffman, March 2022 Reddit AMA

“Datalayer is shipping now to run the final trial of the Climate Warehouse. It is not Filecoin at all.
The way it works is that each Paris Agreement country will have their own local database where they actually put the PDFs of audits and satellite views of the trees, etc. They then subscribe to a NFT as does every other country. Effectively each one has write access to their table in this distributed database but only read access so Japan can update its data in the CW and Costa Rica will see that. Once they do, they ask their fellow database owners for that update, compare it to the merkle hash on the tree to make sure it really was what Japan updated and apply that update.
Datalayer allows you to kind of turn GitHub inside out where you can take any logical database and can checkpoint and audit it. That database can ultimately be like the CW and be public, immutable and publicly auditable or private, immutable, and auditable by internal or third party auditors.”
Gene Hoffman, Reddit, January 30 2022

“Atari is obviously Climate Warehouse and Data Layer, right now looks like Singapore’s going to become the host nation of the Climate Warehouse that is now complete. The kind of targeted go live is Q4-ish and again that’s kind of an ongoing conversation between the various nations and us kind of tracking along with that. The one thing I can tell you is the number of nations and voluntary registries that have been involved with testing the Climate Warehouse has been about 2x what was expected. Apparently word got out that it was cool and it worked and so a lot of people have been wanting to try it out. There is a lot more test data in the public node if you ever want to take a look at that as well. And then we still have not talked about what Project Asteroids is. It is going to get complete but when you’re working with very very large entities, sometimes their internal red tape takes a little while.”
Gene Hoffman, May 2022 AMA

What are Asteroids (and other enterprise partners) thoughts on the CAT1 to CAT2 standard

“I’ll reiterate so I’ve been saying before: that Asteroids the technology was deployed as CAT1 and its infrastructure at the beginning of the year and obviously iterated as CAT2. The Asteroids partner is still there, it is going to happen. I will tell you that our enterprise customers are excited by the fact that we have now audited this specific set of code twice and the fact that the second one found something that was not by the way in the first one – the first one did not find it because it was not there at the time – we consider that a win, it’s almost impossible to write perfect software, I just say it simpler: it is impossible to write perfect software. Even PGP had almost exactly this CVE in the early 2000s. This is why we had two different auditing firms of the top three auditing firms in the world have looked at this specific primitive twice. To answer another question that may come, we also have a third auditing firm look at, assume the academic work and Proof-of-Space/Proof-of-Time works, did we implement it correctly up to ChiaLisp. So that was the NCC Group audit that’s available publicly as well. There’s three audits now, there’s NCC Group, Least Authority, and the most recent Trail of Bits audit. The Trail of Bits audit will be out publicly in a couple weeks because there’s a final step of them confirming that our fix is a fix, we’re very confident that that’s the case. If anything up to confirm to see if our fix is a fix.”

“Our enterprise partners are excited that we are doing the best practices of identifying the riskiest components of our code and making sure getting lots of eyes on it. I’m pretty sure Bram said this before I joined but CATs are the one thing you can most truly mess with easiest. That’s the largest attack surface because you do have direct control and possession if you will of a Chia Asset Token, just a coin.”
Gene Hoffman July 2022 AMA

How will the Climate Warehouse increase demand for XCH?

“The Climate Warehouse is an enabling market (the carbon data) to enable the actual trading and retirement of carbon offsets on chain. Microsoft alone has $600M in demand for carbon credits yearly at $50/ton. The “retail” sale and retirement of the global carbon market settling on the Chia chain will drive a large amount of transactions per block and demand for XCH as a medium to pair/offer/acquire carbon offset CATs. More news on this Soon TM”
Gene Hoffman, March 2022 Reddit AMA

What is the World Bank’s plan regarding the Climate Warehouse?

“So the team is actually kicking off a simulation trial with Climate Warehouse participants right now. Some of you in the community have probably seen the Climate Warehouse portal that launched. So this is actually in flight right now, the team has been working feverishly to get ready for that beta program. Internally at World Bank they refer to that as a simulation. So there’s up to a dozen country participants in that program right now and once that’s complete it will move to a production release in parallel we announced last year a partnership with Costa Rica. Costa Rica is building an open source carbon credit registry and we want to work with them to help integrate that registry directly into Climate Warehouse. As we start to build that and ship that with Costa Rica, we see kind of like a rinse & repeat type of business and onboarding other registries with that exact same set of tools integrated into Climate Warehouse, all open source software. We just want to help registries get there faster so we’re directly engaging to make that happen.”
Paul Hainsworth, March 2022 Anniversary AMA

Can the full node database be compressed?

“I don’t want to get into how good the preliminary results are in our version 2 database numbers because I don’t want to commit to them, but cutting them in half may very well be on the table and being more performant at the same time.”
“Some time in the new year there will be a version 2 of the new database format. There will be a way to move from version 1 to version 2 without resyncing.”
Gene Hoffman, December 2021 AMA

“We’re sticking with SQLite for now because we can get enough optimizations to keep SQLite working well enough for now. We will probably be moving to something less easily trivially flexible but a little more performant somewhere in the future but that’s not necessitated immediately.”
Bram Cohen, December 2021 AMA

“I wouldn’t expect anything as drastic as what happened with V2 which was pretty close to 50% reduction. I do think there probably will be some further improvements in there. You know, one of the things we did with V2 is we literally just compressed the blocks with compression. One thing we talked about is we could compress more with using more options to the compression algorithm, which is a trade off between space and time doing that … you should probably expect the current size of V2 going forward, using that as your growth estimates. I think there is still room for improvements – it will be marginal.”
Earle Lowe, May 2022 AMA

What are updates on ASIC Timelords?

“We are expecting ASICs in our hands around Thanksgiving this year. It will be at least 3x faster than the current fastest and will likely be powered by a USB C wall wart and come in a form factor that looks like a Pi4 case. You’ll use USB C to connect it to the timelord node machine. That machine needs to be somewhat modern as generating the proofs of the time the ASIC is calculating takes some horsepower, but a 3 year old gaming PC without the GPU would be fine.”
Gene Hoffman, March 2022 Reddit AMA

“Our ASIC development in on track … we are going to see a significant speed up from the current fastest timelord. We’re hoping to have silicon in our hands probably around Thanksgiving this year.”
“One thing we’ve kinda changed our opinion on … is that there’s only going to be a few hundred of these. Could be somewhere between 50 and 150 to give a better sense. Each one is a full timelord so each one has all three VDFs in it. We will probably actually have an application process to make sure that these timelords are getting in the hands of researchers and people who need them in our ecosystem so that we kind of get these in the right places at the right time.”
Gene Hoffman, February 2022 AMA

“The good news is we remain on track, we believe we’ll have a first version of it in hand around the Thanksgiving to early December time frame. We got through kind of the last major hurdles which is how much power we’re going to draw. And it turns out it looks like we’re going to be very good there and we’re going to get about a 2-3x speed up over Alder Lake. That’s going to be on three 8mm by 8mm chips so the actually interesting question left is pooling but doesn’t look like it’s going to be that bad. I think what the form factor is going to land on is like a USB-C wall wort to the thing that looks like a Raspberry Pi 4 that has another USB port that you plug into a real computer. So it going to be pretty neat to have all three of the VDF clients in there. We have talked about it in the past but we’ve come around to a position where we’ll try to make 75-150 of them in the initial run. And that’s 150 full time lords so 3 times the number of VDF clients. We will have an application process, we want to see them get out to academics, pools, people that have already contributed to the ecosystem so that those things are being run not just by us but by others and being run for real research purposes or actually securing the chain.”
Gene Hoffman, March 2022 Anniversary AMA

“We remain right on the schedule that we originally were talking about. We believe that we’re going to have silicon in our hands in the Thanksgiving time frame. We currently are running an FPGA version and that was our developing issuing question that we had to move off that we had to get our software adapted to the FPGA that is going to have the same interface as the actual ASIC. The ASIC is looking like it’s going to be relatively easy to cool, super easy to power. Right now I think we’re talking about delivering in a little box that looks like a Pi4. It will have a USB-C or two on it so you will use USB power and USB data to connect the thing. It will require a little bit of a machine so you can’t have a Pi4 be a competitive timelord because you’re still proving the proofs back out over on the CPUs but the hard part is being done obviously on the ASIC. We’re going to get somewhere between 75 and 200 of them. Each one of them is a full timelord – there are three VDFs on each one of the chips. We are going to be selective about who can get them and they also may not be free but they will be nominal in cost. We don’t expect them to be that expensive. We certainly are going to pay a lot more than we will charge. We certainly will be going to be screening this for academic, for pool operators, for folks who are already in the community and have a really good reason. Obviously we’re going to keep quite a few to make sure that we have good redundant backups around the world. The whole goal here is to have a reasonable process and we’ll let others in too but we’ll probably have you have to justify why you’re one of the people who should get one of the ASICs initially. That may change in the second round of all this and that’s something we’ll be planning next year but the whole goal here is to get these in the right hands first. Hopefully too you’ll see some of these start to appear on testnet at the end of the year. It’s gonna be kind of a wild thing to try to underclock them so we can move the network over.”
Gene Hoffman, May 2022 AMA

What is your vision for DID (Decentralized Identify) on Chia?

“We are working on DID right now. DID will be part of our NFT standard as well. NFTs will be owned by DIDs in the Chia ecosystem. That is just the very start of DID. Later this year we will roll out a fully integrated solution for DID that enables for example, someone to verify that they are an accredited investor by integrating with KYC platforms so that wallet can hold a DID that proves that they are an accredited investor. That is the start of a full set of ecosystem experience with DID on Chia. So we’re working on that right now.”
Paul Hainsworth, March 2022 Anniversary AMA

Community and Developer questions

Are there upcoming strategies to improve the developer environment and community developer support?

“We have two parallel branches on how we support the community developers. Paul’s team has a huge set of work they’re doing for products for the developer community – the actual tools and products they use. We have a developers relations team in place I’ve put together over the last few months who is taking those products and tools that the product team builds for the developers and actually supporting the community and ecosystem with those things. And taking their feedback and stuff and folding it back into the product team … they’ve got a lot of work going on right now, where they are looking at our existing documentation, at how it’s shared, formatting it, they’re looking at ways to take what we currently have out there and rescope how we’re sharing it with people. And more importantly actually talking to people in real-time and get a better understanding of what it is they are actually finding gaps in or having problems with so that we can better make the stuff serve those needs.”
J Eckert, May 2022 AMA

“There’s a lot of feedback we’ve received from the community about developing in ChiaLisp and so some of the areas that we are actively looking to support and build solutions for are things around debugging. We currently don’t have a good debugger for ChiaLisp, there’s no syntax that highlights stuff while you’re writing code, you don’t get print statements, you don’t get error messages when things fail – these are some of the issues that we know we need to improve on and you’re gonna hear from us about how we’re bringing those to market. Cameron Cooper is actively working on these things right now so more to come.”
Paul Hainsworth, May 2022 AMA

Are there any updates with the CDI (Circular Drive Initiative)?

“This is a massive massive problem in the industry for e-waste. You know when we first started covering this – could be tens of millions of hard drives. We talked to individual hyperscalers that are at that tens of millions of drives shredded per year. You count all the drives shredded in notebooks and other low cost devices, it is hundreds of millions of storage devices. It is not a problem the industry can solve in 6 months or a year, it’s a really tough problem. We’ve done a couple things. In the short term Seagate has hooked me up with their authorized resellers for recertified drives. We’re trying to get more older drives into that mix – they have these things they call White Label drives which are drives that are new but some of the platters are bad so they depopulate them and sell them for cheaper so I’ve been getting those into farmers hands – it’s already like 15-20 petabytes worth, they’ve been tracking that for me. Seagate does a little over a million of drives per year so these are some of the metrics we’ve been tracking – how much of our netspace is used storage/underutilized storage. As far as the actual drives that will come through the CDI, that will come through a little bit later. We made so much tremendous progress with one of the large hyperscalers but they obviously have agreements with their end customers and the messaging of that is a little sensitive so we’ve been respectful of when they want to do some of these product launch communications. Trust me the guys we are working with are the biggest in the industry so it will be awesome to hear some of the impact Chia is going to have just by pulling this whole thing together. So super exciting and I’m actually presenting on this topic of sustainability in storage, media sanitization, and Circular Drive Initiative in the Open Compute Platform workgroup for storage next week. I’ll send over that link that will be recorded and check out what we’re doing.”
Jonmichael Hands, May 2022 AMA

“There’s a couple questions there. First I don’t know if you guys saw Seagate’s last earning announcement but they absolutely got hammered on what they call their legacy business which is consumer market, like small external hard drives, and the 2.5” hard drives. This is not shocking, anybody has been to a Best Buy anywhere recently or not living under a cave knows for small consumer devices like laptops, SSDs are mainstream. So they’re breaking out their two businesses into mass capacity and everything else. Their mass capacity segment is still their only business left growing so you’ll see them heavily investing in stuff like HMR. One of the things they’ll be doing in the near term, them and Western Digital have announced these 22TB CMRs and 26TB SMR drives, these are generally not meant for consumers and I’m trying to get them to offer them in the channel that Chia farmers and other people that want to buy them just for high capacity drives. This is going to be something really interesting. The other thing we mentioned we do already have a partnership with Seagate and their factory recertified program for any farmers that want to get in with that. We partnered with a couple people in the community to get onesie twosie type drives. Definitely reach out to us they’ve been supporting us with factory recertified drives and used drives for Chia farmers.
On the Circular Drive Initiative we have ton of really interesting announcements. I’m presenting a track at the Flash Memory summit next week in the Bay area and I’ll send some details and the announcement for that for folks that want to attend. We’ll be giving an update on CDI there, we’ve made tremendous progress on a brand new whitepaper that will be published on the Open Compute Project as well as the CDI in the next couple weeks. As far as CDI the actual company is formed and the articles of incorporations have been filed. We’re waiting on a couple of the last founding members, we have 8 founding members, to basically sign the agreement before we can actually make a big public announcement. So that will have to wait a couple months, there’s obviously some high sensitivity about data security from hyperscalers so we can’t step on anybody’s feet. We’ve made amazing progress. So to reiterate big drives are awesome for Chia farming and the same ones that are being used by hyperscalers will be used for Chia farming, there’s no difference to the drives, so we will make those available for all Chia farmers.”
Jonmichael Hands, July 2022 AMA

General Chia questions

What’s the motivation for building Chia?

“I think Bram and I both believe that like blockchains actually can solve real problems in the world but the current offerings had too much electricity, weren’t really secure programming environments, or were illegal securities and so you gotta fix those really big three things to go build a platform that can be deployed globally– they become the rails for money and finance.”
Gene Hoffman, February 2022 AMA

Can Chia be adapted to be decentralized file storage?

“No we’re not doing IPFS, we’re not gonna try to rebuild MojoNation. Blockchains are not about storing large pieces of data, they’re about storing information about data and checkpointing that data. You know, that’s where data layer comes in, there are some things that become very interesting to be able to kind of have as – not really a layer two – but is actually a place where data gets exchanged and transferred in a reliable and secure way that you can validate. There are some things we can do in that world that we think are going to be more interesting. But durable storage we think of as an institutional problem, not necessarily a technology problem.”
Gene Hoffman, February 2022 AMA

Is there a swag store for Chia merchandise?

Summary from February 2022 AMA
- “store.chia.net” is coming, and there will be cool stuff
- Chia Holiday token (CH21) can be redeemed for 10% off.
Summary from May 2022 AMA
- Focus on finding partners for high quality products
- A future community AMA about swag store may be coming
Summary from July 2022 AMA
- Seth has designed the merch and had put together a plan on distributing merch.
- They’ve put this on pause as they’ve hired Allison as CMO.
- Merch is still happening, you can keep the CH21 CAT for a discount.

NFT Questions

What are the plans for the CH21 token and holiday NFTs.

“We had hoped to do a holiday NFT, finally exchange a CAT for NFT around the same time as NFT1 but there were a couple complications. One was the way in which you will be able to redeem it, will be kind of you’ll have a week or two or three or maybe longer to actually do that redemption and we wanted to give you time to do it. We knew when we launched NFT1 that the CAT2 thing was under way so it would not have made sense to have launched a program where you could exchange a CAT for an NFT and somewhere along the line you would have to do a CAT swap because it would have just complicated that project so that’s why we didn’t do it at the launch..
Secondly we had to build the mechanism where you could swap them. What’s going to happen is in the not-too-distance future like within under 60 days you’re going to be able to take the CAT token that you have for the holiday, the new one, everyone should have a CAT2 of it now, you can take your CAT2 holiday 21 token, you will be able to go to a particular site we will have and you will be able to exchange it. And then you will get an NFT instead and you’ll have that NFT. It has been designed, it’s really cool, it’s nothing crazy fancy. This is not… Chia Friends was a very special thing that we did that was self-contained experience of its own. This is not another Chia Friends, I want to manage expectations. It’s just a pretty NFT that is kind of a merit badge reward achievement-unlocked type thing that shows in 2021, as we announced in the blog post in December, in 2021 during that first year you farmed a block, and so you got a holiday Christmas card essentially, from us, in the form of an NFT and this is just delivering on that. So no crazy utility, no crazy stuff, maybe other folks can build utility off of you possessing one maybe but it’s just meant to be a momento that you can keep and hang on to and kind of hopefully one day be a part of other collectible momentos that maybe Chia will give you for accomplishments kind of like achievements. Its going to be soonish you know.”
J Eckert, July 2022 AMA

FAQs

Plotting

What are hardware requirements for plotting?

It is not recommended to purchase expensive hardware for the sole purposes of creating plot files faster. Plotting requirements are actually quite low, requiring about 256 GB of available disk space and 3.5 GB of available RAM.

The Chia software comes with three implementations of the plotting algorithm for different hardware configurations.

Original chiapos - Many tutorials online will refer to this default plotter. It is not resource intensive but takes a longtime to plot (9-24 hours per plot). However due to the low resource requirement multiple instances can be run in parallel with "[staggering](#what-is-an-appropriate-staggerdelay-to-use)". This is an especially recommended approach if plotting directly to HDDs.
madMAx - This the recommended plotter for most users. It parallelizes the plotting process itself to create plots one at a time between 30-75 minutes each. madMAx benefits from high performance temporary space such as enterprise SSDs or a ramdisk (on systems with 128 GB of RAM).
Bladebit - This RAM-only plotter is meant for servers with at least 512 GB of RAM.

See Chia’s wiki for instructions on using these alternative plotters.

Should I create k=32 or k=33 plots? What’s the difference?

You should create k32 plots. k32 plots are the minimum plot size that can be farmed on the Chia network. Each subsequent k requires approximately twice the amount of resources and results in a plot file about twice as large. (what are k-sizes?)

A plot’s chance of winning is directly proportional to its size so because k33s are 2.06x the size of k32s, they’re also 2.06x more likely to win. By plotting k32s, you’ll lose less progress if the plotting process crashes. You can typically plot two k32s in parallel faster than a single k33.

The main reason to plot k=33 (or higher) is to optimize disk space on a drive. Because a k33 is more than twice as a large as a k32, you can use a combination of plot sizes to minimize the leftover (wasted) space on a single drive. See the plotting section for tools to help determine this best mix of plot sizes.

How long are k=32 plots good for?

In the future, when hardware improves to the point where k32s can be economically generated in seconds (grinding attack), the Chia network may make k33 the minimum farmable plot size. This is not expected to happen for at least 10 years (source).

Why does the GUI offer a k=25 plot size?

Although k25 plots cannot be farmed, they are still available to be plotted in the GUI and are a good way to test your plotting set-up or to get familiar with the software.

Can I move my plot files to a different drive?

Yes! Plot files are just static files and can be moved as you wish (more details). It is recommended to temporarily change the file extension until moving is complete to prevent the software from prematurely picking up a partially copied plot (it will report it as invalid). Keep in mind that plots are created with a specific farmer public key so only the corresponding farmer can use them.

When would I need to recreate my plots? Should I replot winning plots?

You shouldn’t need to recreate plots. If you had plotted pre-NFT plots, then you will need to replot to join an official protocol pool. Note that pool-compatible NFT plots can also be set to farm solo.

You do NOT need to replot winning plots. The same plot file can win multiple times.

Does plotting wear out my SSD?

Each ~100GB k32 plot requires about 1.7TB of disk writes in its creation process so this can take a toll on some consumer grade SSDs. For example an SSD rated for a lifetime of 600 TBW (Terabytes written) can create about 35TB worth of plots before exceeding its rated endurance. However, many SSDs continue to function without issue well past its endurance rating as the definition can vary according to manufacturer. This reddit post offers a good explanation of why one might not need to be so concerned with TBW unless planning on plotting very large farms.

Can I plot directly to the destination HDD?

Yes! This is a great way to get started if you don’t have a large SSD drive handy. The only caveat is that HDD plotting is about twice as slow and it cannot handle concurrent operations well – that is, you won’t be able to parallel plot onto a single HDD, nor do any other operations on it simultaneously. However, if you had multiple HDDs connected you could plot directly to each one of them in parallel. See the question below.

Why does my plotting progress appear stuck at 100%?

The plotting process will show 100% after it is complete Phase 4, however there is still the step of copying your plot file to the final destination folder. This can take some time depending on the connection interface (e.g. can take hours over USB 2.0). During the copying process, the complete plot file has extension .plot.2.tmp. After copying to the final destination, it will be rename with extension .plot to be recognized by the Chia software as a valid plot. This last step could be done manually as well if the copying process was interrupted.

How many plots can I do in parallel on my hardware?

(For reference plotter, does not apply for madMAx) The number of plots that can be created in parallel is limited by your most constrained resource. As a rule of thumb, take the minimum of the following:

Number of cores
Amount of RAM (GB) / 4
Temp space (GB) / 256

For example, a Ryzen 3600 (6 core, 12 threads) with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB (900 GB usable) SSD will have values of (6, 8, 3), which means it can comfortably do 3 plots in parallel. However, note that these are based on maximum resource usage. With appropriate staggering or by using a plotting manager tool, 4 or even 5 plots can be run in parallel with those specifications.

What are the resource requirements for the different phases?

(For reference plotter, does not apply for madMAx) This graph shows the different resource utilization of different phases over the plotting process.

Phase 1 is CPU and RAM intensive and is the only phase that makes use of more than one thread.
Phase 2 is where peak disk usage is utilized.
Phase 3 and 4 is where resource utilization starts going down.

By knowing these requirements and the duration of phases on your hardware, it can help determine an appropriate stagger to your parallel plots as to not max out any single resource. For example, one could over-allocate threads to parallel processes if it is timed so that not all processes are in Phase 1 simultaneously.

What is an appropriate stagger/delay to use?

(For reference plotter, does not apply for madMAx) When starting parallel plots in the GUI, you can select a delay before the next plot starts. Ideally, your last parallel plot should start before your first plot has finished so an easy rule is to take the length it takes to run a single plot and divide by the number of parallel plots.

For example, if a single plot takes 10 hours, and you wish to run 5 plots in parallel, a good stagger to use would be 2 hours so that the 5th plot starts at the 8 hour mark.

What does setting a secondary temporary directory do?

(For reference plotter, does not apply for madMAx) If a secondary temporary directory is set, phase 3 will be done in this directory instead. This can be helpful in alleviating space on the primary plotting directory sooner for other processes that might be running in parallel. Notably, if the secondary temporary directory is set the same as the final directory, there is some gain at the end of the plotting process as there won’t be the final step of copying the plot file to the destination drive – it will just rename its extension directly. But if the secondary temporary directory and final directory are on a HDD instead of an SSD, the overall plotting process will still be slower irrespective of this efficiency gain.

Farming / Mining

How can I tell if my plots are farming properly?

In general, you can check the following:

Make sure your status is synced and you have a healthy peer list (at least 5 connections)
Make sure you are seeing blocks with recent times come through (Full Node -> Blocks)
Make sure you occasionally have a plot that passes filter (Farm -> Last Attempted Proof)
Check your logs (at INFO logging level) for eligible proofs being sent within 30 seconds
Consider joining a pool for monitoring tools and statistics to ensure your farm size is reflected properly

See this post for information.

What does “Plots Passed Filter” mean? Why is it 0?

Every block challenge, each (k32) plot has a 1/512 chance of passing the filter. If it doesn’t pass this filter then the plot cannot win the block and hence does not need to be checked. This feature ensures that the farming process does not require constant disk reads.

If you have 512 plots, you would expect on average to have 1 plot pass filter each block. If you have at least a few plots but notice this number is always 0, then you may wish to check that your plots are valid and farming properly.

How is Estimated Time to Win calculated? Why haven’t I won yet?

See this post for a good explanation.

What is Last Height Farmed? And is it okay that it is 0?

Block height is a counter that refers to a location on the blockchain. Last Height Farmed will reflect the most recent height at which you had a plot win a block challenge. If you hadn’t won yet this number should be 0.

Why is Last Height Farmed often censored in screenshots?

By knowing the height of your last winning block, someone could look in the blockchain to determine your wallet address. This would let others know your current wallet address balance and also be aware of any XCH you may obtain to the same wallet address in the future. People may not want their social media profile or personal identity associated with this information.

Is pooling available?

The official pooling protocol was released and a list of pools can be found here. More information about pools can be found on the official pooling FAQ.

Blockchain Software

Why does my status show Not Synced?

This is usually due to a network issue causing a lack of peer connections (see wiki). First check that port 8444 is open to your computer. If not then you can try the following:

Restart the software. Reboot your computer.
If you have more than one node (Chia GUI instance) running on your network, disable UPnP on all but one computer.
Set your router’s port forwarding settings to forward port 8444 to your computer. You can also outright disable UPnP on your router.
(Windows) Check your firewall settings to ensure you are not blocking start_farmer and start_full_node on private networks. And check that your connection is set to be recognized as a private network.
Manually add a peer connection to a known good peer (see below)
Set secondary instances of nodes on your network to function as harvesters instead.
Ensure your system clock time is correct and not more than 5 minutes off (compare to your cell phone network time).

Why am I seeing no peer connections (besides 127.0.0.1)? How can I get more connections?

See the Chia blockchain software wiki.

You can also try to manually add the following official introducers:

Region	Host	Port
North Asia	introducer-apne.chia.net	8444
South Asia	introducer-apse.chia.net	8444
Western North America	introducer-or.chia.net	8444
Eastern North America	introducer-va.chia.net	8444
Europe	introducer-eu.chia.net	8444

If those don’t work, you can add the official Chia nodes directly:

Region	Host	Port
Asia	node-apne.chia.net	8444
North America	node-or.chia.net	8444
Europe	node-eu.chia.net	8444

If that still doesn’t work, you can find a list of known peers with high height on chia.keva.app Node List and add them manually. You may need to delete some existing peers from your list to make room or set the maximum peer count in your config to be higher.

How can I speed up syncing?

The initial download of the blockchain from peers will take some time but keep in mind you can still plot while you’re syncing. If you notice you aren’t connected to many peers, see the above question on ways to get more connections.

If you have access to a fully synced node on a computer that you trust, you can copy a snapshot of the blockchain database over. This file can be found at ~/.chia/mainnet/db/blockchain_v1_mainnet.sqlite

How do I disable UPnP

See the Chia blockchain software wiki.