In our next in the All about Pools series, we are taking a look at Pool4Chia. Pool4Chia are describing themselves as a set of Chia whales that are looking to throw their weight into a pool to help small farmers. I suspect it has more to do with the potential profits of running a major Chia pool, but who cares – a few whales that add their weight to some pools off launch may help them build a lot of netspace quickly, especially with on-chain pools launching so soon.
They are based in the United Kingdom, and have a quite a nice – and ambitious – website. They clearly have plans to add a number of custom tools for their farmers to use, as well as plans to expand out to the forks as soon as they are ready for the on-chain pooling protocol. This is not the same as FoxyPool has done with Flax, but more ambitious.
They are also running a referral program that anyone can sign up in order to incentivize bringing in new members. I think this is an excellent strategy, and if I wasn’t trying to maintain objectivity you would probably find a referral link in this article. I highly recommend taking advantage of it if you do join Pool4Chia. This is the kind of outside the box thinking that will help pools rise above the pack.
One thing I am not a fan of, and again this seems to be very common, is that the team is anonymous. In Speedmann’s article on how to choose a pool he emphasized contact, and basically trust, as the number 1 thing he is looking for in a pool and I tend to agree. This is not limited to Pool4Chia, but I do think that an “About Us” page with some details on the team and a formal contact process would go a long way to instilling that trust.
Based on what I have seen, Pool4Chia seems pretty serious about building up quickly. The referral program is a very nice touch, and they are running a faucet themselves to help anyone who needs to buy an NFT to plot to. They have spots on their website for in-development tools and documentation.
It seems to be that Pool4Chia, and a few other pools as well like MaxioPool and FlexPool, are really picking up the torch of software development and really running with it. It is very interesting me the ecosystem of software that is springing up around the Chia ecosystem and I wonder if these kind of custom software packages will become a real deciding factor between pools. If you see anyone else with interesting software offerings, or anyone else with a similar referral program please let me know in the comments, in discord or on our forums.
