News and insights
News, releases, and insights straight from the team.
Chia Team
Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about Chia and SSD endurance. The Chia proof of space construction requires a lot of sorting on temporary storage space to make the plot format secure and efficient for quick verification later in farming. The Chia plotting workload is only required to be performed once per plot during the initial creation, where the final plot file lives on a low power…
Chia Team
In addition to a new consensus algorithm, with Chia we’ve also built a new on-chain programming environment called Chialisp which is just as powerful as Solidity while also being far more auditable, and scalable. It also fosters much better software development practices. As an example of the power of on-chain programming in Chia, and how it differs from Solidity, in this post I’ll give an…
Chia Team
Knowing how to find a safe, secure, and trustworthy pool is important. There are many pools bidding for your plots, and it is your responsibility to find the best one for you and your needs. Your choice of what pool to join should be carefully researched, not simply based on promises of gold and riches. There are many factors to consider when deciding the right Chia pool for you:
Chia Team
TL;DR: The new plot format has arrived. Upgrade to version 1.2.0 of the Chia Blockchain software to start plotting for pools now and be sure to set up a Plot NFT before doing so. Original plots will continue to be self-farmable but can not be safely used in pools.
Less than 3 months ago the very first chia transaction happened. In the following days we got a real coin price which came in a lot…
Chia Team
Today we are entering the second phase of our testing and roll out of the official pooling protocol. This phase is for pooling operators to test the pooling protocol end to end with testnet bound portable pool plots. Over 9000 lines of new code - much of which is Chialisp - have been written by the team since transaction launch on 5/3 to implement what we think will be the best pooling protocol…
Chia Team
Chia is a complex system. There is a lot of nuance and technicalities involved in understanding how all the components of Chia work together. Over the last several weeks we’ve seen several misconceptions floating around on social media and Keybase regarding how Chia works.
We have compiled the most common misconceptions and questions with responses below.
Also, don’t forget to join us today…
Chia Team
With the release of the MadMax plotter (opens in a new tab) there has been a lot of confusion about what improved plotting speeds mean to the security of the Chia blockchain.
Bram, Gene, and the team will be available to talk about how improved plotting speed is great, what the actual security considerations for the Chia blockchain are, and the kinds of changes that can be made in the future to make sure plotting and…
Chia Team
Many people are coming into Chia that are brand new to crypto. Many are veterans in crypto but new to computer hardware. Farming and plotting are very multidisciplinary, requiring knowledge of storage, networking, and computer architecture. For example, even though I had dealt with using ssh on my home network before Chia, I had never adequately had to lock down a system that I could remotely…
Chia Team
In Chia we’re using BLS signatures which enable noninteractive signature aggregation. In this post I’ll explain how that fits into the system as a whole, what practical benefits it provides, and how our ‘standard’ transaction format works, and what taproot and graftroot really are.
Explaining the motivation and background on taproot and graftroot is outside the scope of this post, so if you don’t…
Chia Team
The Chia project is based on proofs of space and time (opens in a new tab), a brand new Nakamoto consensus allowing for underutilized storage capacity to secure the blockchain. Proofs of space are stored in plot files, where a commonly used k=32 plot is 101.3GiB (108.8 GB, or Gigabytes). Generating plot files is a process called plotting, which requires temporary storage space, compute and memory to create, sort, and…
Chia Team
You can go ahead and install it for Windows (opens in a new tab) and MacOS (opens in a new tab) with lots of other platforms (opens in a new tab) supported too. You can continue plotting in 1.0 and otherwise prepare your farm while we wait for mainnet to start.
The genesis challenge will be distributed using our green flag process at 7AM PDT (14:00 UTC) on Friday March 19, 2021 and that will officially start mainnet! We attempted to choose a time that had the…
Chia Team
We want to give you an update on mainnet timing and our general plans around the launch.
First, as I write this, GitHub Actions is down hard (opens in a new tab) so these plans already have a potential snag to them and are our current best estimate. We want the Chia blockchain to be right and not necessarily right now.
With the RC6 green flag launch we found issues around the green flag process for some and weight proof…
Chia Team
Come join a cocktail hour panel Friday March 5 and learn about the most efficient way to farm large quantities of plotted storage (opens in a new tab) and talk about the impact Chia might have in terms of total electrical capacity used to support all Chia farms.
Joining Bram and Gene will be @xorinox, @storage_jm, and @farming101.
We will be fielding questions and plan to talk about farming rigs and strategies for the…
Chia Team
First it is important to know that there are two very different parts of being a Chia farmer (opens in a new tab). There is creating the plots or plotting and then there is farming the plots. In this post we are going to focus on the process of creating your plots. The types of machines and storage space are very different than the types of hardware you ultimately want to use to farm. You can see some example farming… (opens in a new tab)
Chia Team
Come join a cocktail hour panel with Chia whales^H^H^H^H^H^H experts in plotting.
Joining Bram and Gene will be @xorinox, @storage_jm, @kiwihaitch, and @farming101.
We will be fielding questions and have some topics that are very frequently asked that we plan to cover in depth.
We will again attempt to also stream live on YouTube but haven’t gotten that to work yet… We will update this post with a…
Chia Team
Yesterday evening we released the first version of our Business White Paper. The goal of this document was to go into depth on the transformative impact that programmable digital money is going to have in finance, wealth, safety, digital security, and ultimately the entire concept of trust. Update 2/12/21 - There are now replays of our two Zoom meetings answering questions about the White Paper…
Chia Team
Update: Check the Pooling FAQ (opens in a new tab) for more updates.
As the launch of Chia’s mainnet approaches I want to go over the current status of farmer pools in Chia and what the plans for pooling are in the future.
TL;DR We don’t have pooling fully implemented yet but are building in hooks to make two approaches to farmer pools work well in the future.
We’re approaching pooling support in Chia with caution…
Chia Team
June 6, 2025: This contest is complete, the below has been updated to remove and correct broken links.
A faster plotter and a k=32 plot size minimum mean it’s time for a new farming contest!
Starting at block 11,325 on the Beta 15 (current) chain we’re going to have a farming rewards race to block 13,350. We will count the winning blocks by counting blocks of k size 32 or greater that are rewarded…
Chia Team
June 6, 2025: This contest is complete, links have been removed and updated to reflect this.
Now that the finalized plot format is out in Beta 1.8 and Beta 1.9, it’s time for some fun.
Starting at block 7200 on the Beta 1.8/1.9 chain we’re going to have a farming rewards race to block 9200. The top 5 farmers by blocks won will get their choice of two rare T-shirts. We will count the winners by…
Chia Team
Update: The Chia token standard is going to be called CAT1. Read more here.
Blockchains should make issuing and using coins and assets easier and more trustworthy than in the analog world, but so far the functionality they provide is limited and hacked on awkwardly.
Today we debut one of Chialisp’s most powerful smart transactions - Coloured coins.
Coloured coins are generally known for what they do…
Chia Team
With the release of Alpha 1.4 (opens in a new tab) of the Chia blockchain there is no better time to become a farmer of Space and Time! The Chia testnet blockchain has been cruising along since early December 2019. Since then we’ve added support for more operating systems and platforms like Windows (via the Windows Subsystem for Linux) and machines like the Raspberry Pi 4. We’ve also made the Chia blockchain software…
Chia Team
We just launched our first version of the Chialisp (opens in a new tab) language and on-chain programming environment, which introduces a new and much better approach to building smart transactions. This post will give an overview of what the new innovations are and how they’re better.
The two general approaches to smart transaction environments so far have been from Bitcoin and Ethereum, which I’ll be referring to as…
Chia Team
The Chia blockchain and consensus algorithm aims to provide a more environmentally friendly, decentralized, and secure alternative to proof of work or proof of stake, while maintaining some of the key properties that make Nakamoto consensus desirable. The full description of the algorithm can be reviewed in the Chia Network Green Paper.
This is an alpha quality code release so that means that…
Chia Team
Congratulations to Sundersoft for winning both tracks of the second Chia VDF competition and earning $100,000!
We had four entries that all made large improvements in the speed of the VDF algorithm in both contest tracks compared to our in house reference implementation. Note that these timings are for 4x the iterations and on slightly slower hardware (no turboboost) than the first VDF contest.
Two…
