What is a “plot NFT” in Chia?

**Update** If you are looking for information on artistic NFTs on the Chia Blockchain this is a good starting point.

You might hear the term “pool NFT” or “plot NFT” or “singleton” as it relates to pools in Chia. But what is an NFT in this context? Or any context.

An NFT is a Non-Fungible Token, which literally means a token that cannot be spent. In the context of blockchains this is important, because an NFT is still a coin with an address, but it cannot be spent the same way a “fungible token” or normal coin can be.

In Ethereum there has recently been an explosion of NFT popularity with artists embedding some unique identifier associated with their art and selling them as unique certificates. This has been a very controversial market, with a lot of misunderstanding even among those who are deeply involved in the market. This is important because these NFTs are only similar to the pool contract singletons at very basic technical level.

For Chia the pool contract NFTs are called such because everything on the Chia Blockchain is a coin. So the information you need to secure your pool submissions and collect rewards for your pool are contained in that singleton. A singleton is the something on the blockchain that only exists once. Singular. The process works in such a way that when you want to begin plotting for the on-chain pooling protocol first you need to destroy a mojo, one trillionth of an XCH. When you destroy that you create a new coin – the NFT. But this does not sit in your wallet as a spendable mojo anymore, but as a pool contract singleton. So now on top of all your XCH, each of which is also contained in coins, you now have this single mojo coin that cannot be spent or transferred that contains the information needed when participating in an on-chain pool. Now as the owner of that coin you can associate it with a pool, like Flexpool or TruePool, or you can “solo farm” it and keep it associated to your own “pool”.

This can be hard to wrap your head around, but it is important to understand how it works so you can plan appropriately when you need to make changes to your setup. Its important to know that even those the plots are called “portable plots” you cannot transfer them to another wallet because they are tied to that NFT, and that NFT cannot be transferred. The portability comes because they do not have a defined pool and can be moved between pools. This will be confusing to some, and I know of people who have honestly thought that they were movable because they were called portable and tied to a coin.

This is part of the problem with all cryptocurrency projects, not just Chia. The language and terminology is confusing. Sometimes it feels almost like it is designed be so. If the goal is to drive mass adoption, and not to allow a set of knowledgeable insiders to grift people, then these terms need to be more accessible and words like “portable” need to be considered from a user’s perspective, not a programmer’s. Chia Network even keeps a “Great Chia Glossary” and these terms are not found there, as it is geared towards Chialisp programmers.