In case you missed it, we have been doing interviews with the various pool operators and writing a little bit about them – information you cant find on their websites. We don’t focus on things like pool fees and and promises, but get a sense of the people running the pools themselves and what their motivations and experience is.
The pools generally fall into two main categories: the in-progress custom pools, and the upcoming on-chain pools using the pooling protocol in development by Chia Network.
The two custom pools we have covered so far are Hpool, the current biggest Chia pool, and Core-Pool, their main competitor. Hpool wouldn’t respond to my queries, so I did my best to get my thoughts down on that. Core-Pool did sit down with me, and it was a super interesting conversation.
For the upcoming on-chain pools, we have spoken to a few. First I spoke to 21Chia, This is where I ran head first into the fact that a lot of these pools would be run anonymously. I then spoke to Spacefarmers, who are a small group of Chia farmers that built their own custom pool with a small group of people built on trust before they decided to develop a public pool. After that we spoke to Maxiopool, who again are a series of technically competent Chia farmers who decided to take their knowledge to develop a pool considering the demand. Then we spoke to Flexpool, who is a relatively large Ethereum mining pool who is getting into Chia farming, very interesting bunch.
In the next couple of weeks we will be talking to more pools, with the next being Foxypool – the first pool is who is currently running a custom pool as well as developing an on-chain pool that they were run concurrently. Also they have started a Flax pool. As you can see, there is a lot to be interested in this space and more to the pools than just the stats on their web pages. Keep checking back for more. If you would like me to talk to your favorite pool operator, either have them reach out to me or come find me in our Discord server or on our Forums and let me know.