It's been less than a month since the Chia Network officially introduced pooling support, but TrueNAS has already found 214 people willing to contribute a combined 1.23PB of space to farming Chia together so they can maximize their profits.
TrueNAS offers a variety of software dedicated to network attached storage. Its most popular offering is TrueNAS Core, an open source platform that evolved from FreeNAS, and now the developers have broken into Chia farming with TruePool.
Pools are supposed to give Chia farmers a greater chance at winning a challenge issued to a block of plots devoted to the network so they can earn a Chia coin (XCH). That coin is then split amongst the pool's maintainers and its contributing members.
Chia farmers aren't required to join pools, and they're free to leave as they wish, but the reduced chances of winning a challenge and XCH's lower pricing have made it nearly impossible for individual farmers to turn a profit. Pooling is their best option.
The freedom afforded to farmers means pools have to compete for their allegiance, however, which is where TruePool might have an advantage over its competition. The pool only takes a 1% operating fee, 25% of which supports the TrueNAS project.
That appeal to people who want to support open source projects seems to be working. StorageReview reported on Tuesday that the pool had 210 members contributing 1.18PB of storage; four more farmers added 0.05PB (50TB) overnight.
TruePool's own stats also mark its fast growth. The project claims it had just 5.65TB devoted to its pool on July 2 (which would have been a test before pooling was officially introduced) but was able to pass the 1PB mark on July 19.
But even that fast-growing pool will have paltry returns for its members. TruePool estimates that it will take nearly six days for it to win 1 XCH, which is worth $190.44 at time of writing, according to the latest pricing information from Coinbase.
If they each contributed an equal amount of storage (which is unlikely), that means TruePool's 214 members would each receive approximately $0.89 roughly once a week before the pool's 1% cut is taken into consideration. At that point they're basically just paying for the power required to operate their drives.
