A new service meant to objectively test the various Chia pools has launched, XCHCentral.com is promising to keep an eye on the pools and how they are doing from an objective sense. This is a very important project if done well and I plan to support them as much as possible. This will be critical for both farmers to check on wild claims made by the pools, as well as the pools themselves to keep an eye on their relative performance to make sure there is no funny business going on with their members.
Basically what they are doing is both simple, and very powerful. They are going to create NFT singletons for each Pool and plot 101 K32 plots to each (10.0TB). Then they are going to track over time the specific pool performance and rate them. I had personally being tossing an idea similar to this around for a few months now, but it seemed like a ton of work. XCHCentral has taken on that work with a two-person team and so far has 5 pools being monitored.
This is such an exciting project and I will be definitely keeping an eye on this. Its also something that I will probably need to investigate for accuracy once it starts providing data to the community. I spoke to XCHCentral_JM in Keybase a little bit last night and the team there seems very interested in maintaining transparency and trust, and is merely thinking out best way of doing that without compromising the project. So far it looks like PoolChia is ahead, but if this is accurate that should actually change back and forth quite a bit.
Personally I think this is one of the best, most important services to launch in the Chia ecosystem. With so many accusations of shady behaviour being tossed around it will be nice to have a single dashboard to make sure that everyone is within statistical spitting distance of each other. Lets just hope this team doesn’t end up being one of the pools in sunglasses and a wig, because this tool only works if it is perfectly objective. I was also a bit suspicious of the pools section of Chia Profitability because of the association with their pool, so I hope XCHCentral avoids that fate and stays as independent as possible.
