In the midst of the reported shortage in supply of storage hard discs, Chia Network is once again put into the spotlight, as it is being blamed for the latest market crisis.
The developer of blockchain and smart transaction platform that also has its native cryptocurrency in chia dubbed as the “green” alternative to bitcoin operates on proof-of-space consensus algorithm and is, therefore, storage dependent, as opposed to the leading crypto and its current rival ethereum.
While consuming relatively lower levels of energy, the discs needed for farming chia still require power to produce and run. Some reports indicated this will eventually render hardware involved in the algorithm useless after few weeks, causing higher demand for storage products that hurt the supply in return.
Growing rapidly
PlanetScale engineer Rick Branson said that in just 24 hours, Chia Network has grown by almost one Exabyte, adding such a scale of growth is hard to understand as it would mean burning a 1 Terabyte solid-state drive (SSD) every 3 seconds.
On May 26, New Scientist put the amount of space leveraged into mining chia to 12 million Terabytes of hard disc space. Prior to Chia Network’s launch, such figure was at just 3 million Terabytes. It has since grown exponentially at both an impressive and alarming rate.
Increased demand and prices
The increasing demand for SSDs is reported to be the cause of the price surge of the item. But Chia Network President Gene Hoffman argued that in the future, manufacturers will ramp up their production to meet the rising demand. This will then lead to lowering the costs of both SSDs and HDDs.
Meanwhile, at the time of writing, chia is ranked 119th in terms of market capitalization and is trading at $779. It is showing a 22% decline for the past week and lost 53% of its all-time-high of $1,645 attained less than two weeks ago.
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