Chia Network was co-founded by
Bram Cohen, the creator of
BitTorrent, and Ryan Singer in 2017. Cohen said he was inspired by
Bitcoin and the rise of cryptocurrency, and that he believed digital currencies would be safer, faster, and create more financial autonomy. He also had reservations about the various issues surrounding
cryptocurrencies, such as the energy consumed in
bitcoin mining. Chia blockchain runs on the company's programming language Chialisp. Chia Network released a beta version of its
blockchain and native token, XCH, to developers in April 2019. By the end of 2020, the network had 1,700
nodes. Following an early 2021 funding round in which Chia Network raised $61 million, the company was valued at $500 million. Investors in the company include
Andreessen Horowitz,
Naval Ravikant,
Breyer Capital, and others. By 2021, users had allocated approximately 40 billion gigabytes of storage to Chia Network. That year, the company announced that it was considering going public via a traditional
initial public offering (IPO) or by merging with a
special-purpose acquisition company. When the company began trading XCH on May 3, 2021, it held 21 million tokens in reserve. According to
Business Insider, the growth of the company and its XCH token led to a rise in prices of
hard disk drives and
solid-state drives. On April 14, 2023, the company announced that it was nearing an IPO having submitted a draft registration statement to the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As of 2023, Chia had filed a draft registration with the
Securities and Exchange Commission towards an IPO. In China, stockpiling ahead of the May 2021 launch led to shortages and an increase in the price of
hard disk drives (HDD) and
solid-state drives (SSD). Shortages were also reported in
Vietnam. Hard drive manufacturer
Seagate said in May 2021 that the company was experiencing strong orders and that staff were working to "adjust to market demand". During the first months since Chia's launch, concerns were raised about the prerequisite plotting process drastically limiting a hard drive's lifetime. In late 2024 and early 2025, reports emerged of used hard drives being fraudulently resold as new, with Chia farms being identified as a likely source. These farms were reportedly closed because Chia mining was no longer profitable. ==Chia coin==