{"id":102016,"date":"2021-07-09T09:18:05","date_gmt":"2021-07-09T16:18:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=102016"},"modified":"2026-05-14T14:06:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T21:06:19","slug":"chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-to-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-to-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Chia Analysis: To Farm, or Not to Farm?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Editor’s Note<\/h4>\n

This post reflects Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage pricing at the time it was published. We’ve since shared more recent price and product updates<\/a>.<\/p.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The arrival of Chia on the mainstream media radar brought with it some challenging and interesting questions here at Backblaze. As close followers of the hard drive market, we were at times intrigued, optimistic, cautious, concerned, and skeptical\u2014often all at once. But, our curiosity won out. Chia is storage-heavy. We are a storage company. What does this mean for us? It was something we couldn\u2019t ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Backblaze has over an exabyte of data under management, and we typically maintain around three to four months worth of buffer space. We wondered\u2014with this storage capacity and our expertise, should Backblaze farm Chia?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For customers who are ready to farm, we recently open-sourced software to store Chia plots<\/a> using our cloud storage service, Backblaze B2. But deciding whether we should hop on a tractor and start plotting ourselves required a bunch of analysis, experimentation, and data crunching\u2014in short, we went down the rabbit hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After proving out if this could work for our business, we wanted to share what we learned along the way in case it was useful to other teams pondering data-heavy cloud workloads like Chia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grab your gardening gloves, and we\u2019ll get into the weeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a table of contents for those who want to go straight to the analysis:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Should Backblaze Support and Farm Chia?<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Helping Backblaze Customers Farm<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Should Backblaze Farm?<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. The Challenges of Plotting<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. The Challenges of Farming<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. Can We Make Money?<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. Our Monetization and Cost Analysis for Farming Chia<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. Should We Farm Chia? Our Decision and Why<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  9. Afterword: The Future of Chia<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    How Chia Works in a Nutshell<\/strong>\r\n

    If you\u2019re new to the conversation, here\u2019s a description of what Chia is and how it works. Feel free to skip if you\u2019re already in the know.<\/p>\r\n

    Chia is a cryptocurrency that employs a proof of space and time algorithm that is billed as a greener alternative to coins like Bitcoin or Ethereum\u2014it\u2019s storage-intensive rather than energy-intensive. There are two ways to play the Chia market: speculating on the coin or farming plots (the equivalent of \u201cmining\u201d other cryptocurrencies). Plots can be thought of as big bingo cards with a bunch of numbers. The Chia Network issues match challenges, and if your plot has the right numbers, you win a block reward worth two Chia coins.<\/p>\r\n

    Folks interested in participating need to be able to generate plots (plotting) and store them somewhere so that the Chia blockchain software can issue match challenges (farming). The requirements are pretty simple:<\/p>\r\n