Remember Chia?

For a few glorious and slightly insane months in 2021, it seemed as though every spare hard drive on Earth was about to be pressed into cryptocurrency service.  Instead of the GPUs and ASICs that Bitcoin miners wanted.  Chia farmers lusted after hard drives.  Lots and lots and lots of hard drives.

If you were hanging around the server, storage, or homelab world at the time, you probably remember people suddenly buying 12TB, 16TB, and 18TB drives by the case.  Enterprise SSDs became precious commodities.  People were assembling plotting machines with absurd amounts of NVMe storage and memory.  Chia calculators were telling people that the stack of disks in their basement was basically a money printer.

And then, seemingly, Chia vanished.  What happened?

Bitcoin, But With Hard Drives

Chia was created by Bram Cohen, best known as the creator of BitTorrent.

The idea was to solve one of the biggest criticisms of Bitcoin: all that computing power and electricity being consumed simply to prove that miners had performed a lot of computation.  Instead of Bitcoin’s Proof of Work, Chia introduced what it calls Proof of Space and Time.  Rather than proving that you’ve burned electricity doing calculations, you prove that you’ve dedicated storage space to the network.

Chia’s mainnet officially launched on March 19, 2021.  Users created large files called plots, stored them on hard drives, and then “farmed” those plots for a chance to receive XCH, Chia’s cryptocurrency.  The original standard k32 plot was about 101 GiB.

In theory, one of Chia’s big attractions was that people could use otherwise idle storage they already owned.  Your NAS had a few terabytes sitting empty?  Put that unused disk space to work securing a blockchain and perhaps earn a little cryptocurrency along the way.

That sounds wonderfully efficient.  Naturally, humans immediately decided that instead of using spare hard drive capacity, they should manufacture enormous farms containing thousands of brand new hard drives.

Demand took off so quickly that reports of storage shortages began appearing across Asia.  By May 2021, mainstream publications were reporting shortages and rising prices for large HDDs and NVMe SSDs as Chia farmers accumulated storage.  Eventually Chia’s effective network space passed 30 exabytes.

30 exabytes!

This was not Joe Random User contributing the unused 2TB on his Synology anymore.

The Economics Ate Themselves

Imagine that Chia has 1 exabyte of storage committed to the network and you own 100TB.  You have .01% of the total network and therefore expect .01% of the farming rewards.  So you buy more drives.   MOAR!

Unfortunately, ten thousand other people have exactly the same idea.  Pretty soon the Chia network has 2 exabytes.  Then 5.  Then 10.  Then 20.  Then 30.  Your 100TB farm hasn’t changed, but your percentage of the network has collapsed.  The number of XCH you can expect to farm with each terabyte falls right along with it.  At 30EB, your percentage has dropped to .000333%.

From $1,934 to About $1.36

XCH trading opened during the frenzy in May 2021.  According to CoinMarketCap, Chia reached an all-time high of $1,934.51 on May 3, 2021.

Five years later, as of September 16, 2026, XCH is trading for roughly $1.36.  That’s a drop of 99.93%.  CoinGecko puts Chia’s current market capitalization at only around $28 million.

That is quite a comedown for something that briefly had people buying pallets of hard drives.  Falling XCH prices combined with rising network storage created a nasty one-two punch for farmers.  First, each terabyte earned fewer XCH and then each XCH became worth less money.

100TB today makes ~$4.80 per month, at a time when hard drive costs are soaring due to AI.  (And that $4.80/month is before electricity).

Chia’s network has shrunk dramatically from its peak.  An August 2026 analysis from Chia-focused publication XCH.today estimated effective netspace at under 4 EiB, with actual raw disk capacity probably below 3 EiB, or 10% of peak.

But Didn’t Chia Destroy SSDs?

You may remember headlines claiming that Chia farming destroyed SSDs.  Technically, plotting was the problem, not farming.

Creating one of Chia’s original plots involved an enormous amount of temporary writing.  Chia itself estimated that creating a roughly 101 GiB k32 plot could involve about 1.3 TiB of writes to the temporary storage device.  Farmers wanted to create plots as quickly as possible, so many used NVMe SSDs as temporary plotting drives.  Do that hundreds or thousands of times and you start chewing through a lot of write endurance.

Consumer SSDs were never designed for that workload.  Some could burn through their rated endurance remarkably quickly.  Chia itself recommended using higher-endurance enterprise or workstation-class SSDs rather than ordinary consumer flash.

Once a plot was created and moved onto a hard drive, however, farming was extremely gentle.  The drive mostly sat there waiting for tiny reads.  So Chia didn’t really murder hard drives.  It encouraged a generation of crypto farmers to torture SSDs while filling hard drives.

Chia Network Didn’t Go Away

You might think the Chia project itself quietly disappeared sometime around 2022, it didn’t.  Chia Network is still actively developing the software.  In fact, Chia 2.7.4 was released this month.

And Chia is preparing for the biggest change to farming since the network launched.  It’s called Proof of Space 2, or PoS2.  Chia 3.0 will introduce a completely redesigned proof-of-space system intended, among other things, to eliminate the plot compression tricks that allowed farmers with additional computing power to effectively claim more storage than they physically possessed.

The new system also dramatically changes plots.  The old minimum k32 plot was around 100 GiB.  The new plots will be around 1 GiB each.

But…everybody farming Chia will eventually have to replot.  Current plans call for the hard fork to activate at block 9,562,000, expected around November 2026.  Old plots will then be gradually phased out over 256 days.

So somewhere out there are people with petabytes of Chia plots who get to experience the joy of plotting their drives all over again.

Then There’s the 21 Million XCH Elephant in the Room

Chia also has one tokenomics detail that has generated controversy since the beginning.  Before ordinary farmers started earning XCH, Chia Network Inc. created a 21 million XCH strategic reserve, usually called the prefarm.  All 21 million XCH from the first block went to addresses controlled by Chia Network Inc.

Chia has since used portions of that reserve, including transfers associated with market-making activities.  Whether you think the strategic reserve is clever corporate financing or an uncomfortably large pile of company-controlled cryptocurrency is left as an exercise for the reader.

For years Chia Network talked about becoming a publicly traded company.  But in 2023 the company lost its banking relationship when Credit Suisse collapsed.  Its IPO plans were delayed, and Chia laid off 26 of its roughly 70 employees, about one-third of the company.  Chia has continued communicating with the SEC about its proposed registration, but as of 2026 Chia Network remains privately held.

So Is Chia Dead?

No.  The blockchain is still active, people keep farming, and the code is still being developed.   So Chia didn’t die, though the idea that filling a basement with newly purchased hard drives as an easy route to riches sure did.

Chia was an interesting technical idea designed around using a resource people already had sitting idle.  But as often happened, speculators arrived and ruined it by trying to scale to insanity.

Five years later, we’re back to “Hey, if you’ve got some unused hard drive space, maybe you can earn a few bucks with it”…which is more or less where Chia started.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.