What is ChainGreen and should you be farming it?

ChainGreen is a full fork of the Chia Blockchain open-source software released by the Chia Project. The claim here is that it is a less centralized implementation of the Chia software with less developer control over the market. They achieve this by changing the payout structure and not doing a pre-farm prior to the mainnet launch.

ChainGreen seems to be an actual company run by actual people, with their Whitepaper listing specific executives. This is a good sign, as a project like this run by anonymous internet people would raise many red flags. The executives seem to have a history with Blockchain technologies, although nothing I have ever heard of.

So what is different? Not a whole lot. As you can see below, from a windows UI perspective it is effectively the same software. They appear to have forked chia-blockchain at version 1.1.6 so I assume they will face some of the same issues caused during the syncing process that lead to the release of Chia version 1.1.7. All in all at the surface level the implementation looks identical.

But what did they change, specifically? They don’t list out in their whitepaper exactly which variables were adjusted to achieve the changes, but with their “emission schedule” (don’t love that) they will have a similar 4608 blocks per day structure to Chia except with the payout being 500 CGN and halving every four years, exactly like Bitcoin. This will lead to a maximum number of coins at 6 675 120 000 CGN before the blockchain moves entirely deflationary with transaction fees being the farming reward. This along with the lack of a pre-farm seems like it will hit those farmer dopamine receptors with bigger rewards due to much smaller netspace and bigger reward numbers.

I have installed the Chain Green software in a virtual machine running Windows 11 (because why not?) and the first thing that occurred to me is that while you can farm your same plots that you created for Chia that would require you to input your main Chia private keys into this application. I did not do that, and I do not recommend you do that. At least not at this stage. There is no guarantee the Windows binary chaingreen.exe is the same build as the source and that there is nothing nefarious going on here. A project like this would be an excellent strategy to steal private keys from farmers.

I do not actually think that something malicious is the plan here, there seem to be real people associated with this and a lot of work put into giving the company an air of legitimacy. But I have already learned that in the cryptocurrency space there are many scams and schemes trying to take your coin, so I recommend extreme caution when dealing with private keys and i recommend you farm your Chaingreen keys from a separate machine using our guide. You can even farm ChainGreen using your chia.exe software from another machine, just extract your public keys from chaingreen and use those. That’s how close the software is.

The other difference seems to be it runs on port 8744 instead of 8444. So yeah, not a lot.

I will post an update to the farming process in a few days to see if there is any major differences, and how much I’m getting rewarded. I play to plot out a few TB and see how that goes. I dont expect this to net any actual human grocery money but I might have a giveaway for some CGN tokens if I can farm any.

Edit: An update after a couple days of running ChainGreen.