The San Francisco-based firm Chia Network, a blockchain and smart currency platform, best known for its storage-based mining, has confirmed that it raised $61 million from notable investors, such as Andreesen Horowitz, DHVC, Collab+Currency, Slow Ventures, and Breyer Capital.
Following the funding round, the firm is now valued at more than $500 million.
“We want to make digital currency easier to use than cash,” declared the president and CEO of Chia Network, Gene Hoffman.
Hoffman also declared that “Our goal has always been to go public relatively quickly as that will significantly clarify our regulatory environment and allow customers to use currency to hedge public market volatility, which is different from other coins.”
Chia is also known for the fact that, unlike Ethereum or Bitcoin, which require proof of work for validating the network transactions, Chia uses a proof of space-time consensus algorithm. A Chia farmer has the role of sending proof to a verifier of a transaction, but solid-state drivers and hard-drive disks are used, in this case, for storing the data.
Chia is also considered to be eco-friendly since its storage-based network uses less energy compared to a typical GPU miner.
The main net of Chia Network was released on March 19th, which has increased the demand for storage drives – some areas have even dealt with shortages and increases in prices. SSD manufacturers reflect that, as Seagate is now up 31.52%, while Western Digital is up 12.91%.
Some believe that following the release of Ethereum’s EIP-1559, mining ETH could become unprofitable, so, could Chia replace it? Remains to be seen.
Source: Bitcoinist.com