In today’s entry in our All about Pools series, we are looking at TruePool. TruePool is an on-chain Chia Pool developed and managed by the iXsystems development team behind the TrueNAS network storage distribution. This one is really interesting to me because TrueNAS has been a real player in the DIY NAS space for many years and have subsequently proven their ability to manage an open source project.
It turns out that the TrueNAS team has been aware and involved in cryptocurrency mining from early on, from Bitcoin mining to running a very successful Cardano ADA staking pool. I’m not 100% sure what is involved in the latter, but I suspect that having run that pool will give them valuable experience in running their Chia Pool much the same way as Flexpool.
Like the other on-chain pools, TruePool is pretty comfortable that they will be able to siphon off a lot of current users from HPool and the other off-chain pools that launched early. Especially since they are a real company with real identities behind their pool. They also recognize that there will be real value to Chia farmers long term in pools that are identifiable and trustworthy, and they bring a pretty serious name to that.
I’m really excited that the rest of the Chia community is starting to see things the way I do, where trust and stability are going to be significantly more important long term for a pool operator than a half percentage point of fees. Chia farming is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and being able to contact companies you are doing business with is actually a big deal.
Like the rest of the on-chain pools so far, TruePool allows you to farm with them completely through the GUI without ever signing up for anything. But they offer so much more than that. Because they have a very competent NAS platform that supports running docker images, they have released an “official” TrueNAS container with the official Chia software, Mad Max Plotter, Farmr.net, Plotman and some other tools we haven’t covered here yet. I think this is a fantastic community addition, and I am hoping to work closely with them as we work as a community to improve the Chia Full_node and wallet applications.
Again and again I hear from the pool operators that Chia Network is attempting to exert no control whatsoever over the pools, and is extremely helpful during the development process. At this point, having heard the same thing probably a dozen times now, I think it is fairly safe to say that outside the weirdness they went through with me they are actually trying to stay fairly hands off the community. By not trying to flex any muscle with the pools they are definitely taking a community-first approach to this, since developer-pool relations have been traditionally very antagonistic. This is a good idea, and we should encourage them to not change this strategy. A good relationship with the pools will definitely help keep Chia relevant as the utility portion of the network is built out.
So far the pool has gathered over a PB of space and is continuing to grow steadily. They have the advantage of their association with TrueNAS and are getting some media attention outside the core Chia websphere. They are also going to put 25% of their pool fee (so 0.25% of rewards) towards the TrueNAS project which is a huge benefit to the wider storage community.
Honestly, TruePool hits all the pointers for me and I think if they end up with enough netspace they have the potential to be one of the top pools. And because of the funding that will go to TrueNAS in that scenario, I’m rooting for them.
