Chinese crypto miners are now looking past ASICs and GPU miners. They have set their eyes on Chia mining, forcing the prices of hard drives to surge.
Several hardware news outlets have reported an increase in investments from Chinese traders into the Chia network mining. This has led to a spike in the prices of hard drives, particularly, enterprise-grade ones.
According to data from Manmanbuy.com, a Chinese mobile app that keeps track of the prices of goods sold on e-commerce sites, the prices of various models of storage devices have increased by as much as 100% since the beginning of the month. For instance, an 8TB Seagate enterprise-grade hard drive sold at 1,150 yuan on Taobao before April 14. The same device now costs 2,169 yuan.
What’s the craze about?For some context, Chia is a decentralized storage network that was founded in 2017 by Bram Cohen. Chia claims to be “a better blockchain and smart transaction platform which is more decentralized, more efficient, and more secure.” Its creators claim that they want to tackle some of the problems of traditional crypto mining activities such as e-waste. The protocol uses hard drive storage capacity for its consensus mechanism.
Surprisingly, miners are already trading XCH, Chia’s native cryptocurrency, over-the-counter even though on-chain transactions will not be enabled until May 3. Bids and asks are around $200.