Roughly a week back, we reported that the ChiaCoin network had grown by a whopping 5 times in the last 30 days. However, it appears that that might have been an underestimation. As per BoA analysts, over the last month, the Chia network’s storage utilization increased by more than twenty times to a whopping 8 Exabytes or 8,000 Petabytes.
In comparison, Seagate’s total shipments in the first quarter of 2021 amounted to 140 exabytes. At this rate, it’s clear that HDD vendors such as Seagate and Western Digital will be reaping decent amounts of profits if this goes on for the rest of the year. For now, large-capacity HDDs such as 7-14 TB drives have already started seeing price hikes of 15-20%, but the mainstream consumer segment is largely unchanged.
In terms of its price, Chia has remained largely stable, trading between $800 and $1,200 since it went public in the first week of May. In case you missed our early coverage, ChiaCoin has been designed by the founder of BitTorrent with a plan to create a green cryptocurrency that’s more stable than traditional coins. Since it leverages storage media which consumes much less power than CPUs and GPUs, this is largely true, but it’ll be interesting to see if the digital waste produced by miners (farmers) will be worth the trouble.
