Look at how the Chia pools are doing according to XCHCentral.com

Last month one of the most interesting projects in the Chia ecosystem launched, XCHCentral.com. I have been keeping a very close eye on this and what the various Chia pools are actually paying out. I think an independent watcher keeping an eye on the pools is something that benefits us all, even the pools themselves. If you are wondering where my bias lies, it is firmly the camp of independent analysis so you will probably see me lean on this site quite a lot when discussing this topic.

Quick recap here on what XCHCentral is doing. They have farmed out 10TB (101 K32 plots) onto a number of different plot NFTs and have begun farming each one with a different pool and carefully recording the real world rewards. The purpose of this to create an independent record of what farmers actually getting paid by the pools. So after about a month with their original 5 NFT Pooling protocol pools how are they doing?

Interestingly enough FlexPool is not 14% ahead of the others. In fact its kind of falling behind the leaders of the pack as well as the newer entrants. And so is SpacePool even more interestingly. The important thing to note however is that these margins are very thin, and definitely inside the margin of error. FoxyPool and ChiaHub are both looking very strong here, but don’t have as much data behind them and that creates an unfair comparison. We shall see in another couple of week if things have evened out or now.

PoolChia is currently slightly in the lead of the five pools that were there from the start. That’s cool, I really like that team and I know they are dedicated to running a good pool so its nice to see that recognized here. I firmly suspect that XCHPool, TruePool, ChiaHub, FlexPool etc will all take turns at the front of the pack. SpacePool I’m actually not so sure about, its too big to see real swings so I am think this might be a trend there.

I think the real winner here are the farmers. It doesn’t appear that any of the pools are doing anything wrong. I feel a bit bad for TruePool who has not been having a good month it looks like, but that’s one of the risks of joining a smaller pool. The other side of that is the possibly noticeable extra rewards during a hot streak – Like ChiaHub is in the middle of.

I am really hoping that this project can grow to incorporate the rest of the popular pools, and I hope that there will be a mechanism available in the near future to ensure this project stays funded. Since it has launched I haven’t seen a lot of wild claims about one pool being measurably better than another. That’s important. The differences between pools are real, and you should pick yours carefully. But if run correctly it is very unlikely that one is better than the other.