So Chia pools were released about a week ago, a little more or less with some pools having launched early and some cautious ones still waiting to launch. And there have been some growing pains, that is undeniable, but on a whole how are they doing?
Well if you look at miningpoolstats.com you can tell that they are doing REALLY well. However, they are not actually siphoning many users away from the OG pools as of now. If you look at the pool netspace change chart in the following image you can see that Hpool is indeed losing some members. Possibly a very significant number of users. But CorePool, and FoxyPool and the other OG / custom pools are not actually losing much netspace, and Huobipool is still growing.
But if you look at the growth of the on-chain, or “official” pools they are growing at a phenomenal rate with Space Pool even cracking the top 5 already. I think it will be some time before any of then are seriously challenging Hpool but that time is coming.
More pools are coming online every day, having solved the issues with the reference code to their satisfaction, with Spacefarmers announcing they are live. But some of the pools that aren’t in that top 20 list are starting to run into issues where they are not winning blocks enough to keep their members. PoolChia has announced that they are going to subsidize the pool from their personal Chia stash in order to reward members.
This does not bode well for the small pools and I suspect that more and more will begin to struggle and drop off and we will see some consolidation. FlexPool hasn’t even launched yet and that is probably going to shock the smaller pools again.
My experience with pooled farming so far has been very positive. I do not think its appropriate to advertise who I am pooling with until I have completed coverage of all the pools that that to join the All About Pools series, but I am fairly happy with it. But I am not aware if the developers there are subsidizing it or if they have hit critical mass or just been lucky. But as easy as moving pools might be, I haven’t been incentivized to do so yet.
