Chia Network, the company behind Chiacoin, raises $61 million at a $500 million valuation

• The funding round was backed by marquee names like a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), Richmond Global Ventures, and more.
• The company is founded by Bram Cohen, the founder of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol.
• Chiacoin intends to offer a green alternative to bitcoin.

While the crypto world is in the middle of a storm and currencies are struggling to find balance, Chia Network has managed to raise a total of $61 million via a host of investors. It's now valued at a whopping $500 million and has been operational since 2018.

The funding round was backed by marquee names like a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), Richmond Global Ventures, Breyer Capital, Slow Ventures, True Ventures, Cygni Capital, Naval Ravikant, Collab+Currency, and DHVC.

Chia Network is a blockchain and cryptocurrency platform that runs Chiacoin. The company is founded by Bram Cohen, the founder of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol. The cryptocurrency intends to take on bitcoin's might by applying the knowledge from the last thirteen years -- a snark at the veteran currency that is often snubbed to be too old.

Cohen has often hinted that his ambition is to float the company on a stock exchange, adding a layer of legitimacy. While cryptocurrencies have come a long way in adoption, their integration with the existing financial system is still rough. Coinbase achieved a significant achievement and set a precedent by becoming the first publicly listed crypto exchange.

"We want to make digital currency easier to use than cash," Gene Hoffman, Chia's president and chief operating officer, said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Chiacoin, the green alternative to Bitcoin?

Bitcoin has received a lot of criticism lately for being too energy-hungry. The rush to mine as quickly as possible gave birth to mining farms, which usually run on electricity generated by fossil fuels. Many experts, including Elon Musk, have criticized it for being too polluting. And, this is where Chiacoin intends to offer a solution.

Chiacoin was recently unveiled and is based on a "proof of space" concept for mining. In simple words, bitcoin requires computing power to calculate complex algorithms. Chiacoin uses storage on a hard drive to mine, in turn, consuming exponentially lower energy. The proof is that some disk or SSD space is actually used to store specific data.

The cryptocurrency's circulation is limited now, and you can purchase it from sites like Gate.io. The team has revealed that it'll be available on mainstream crypto exchanges soon. For now, the community has started mining as much Chia as possible, and the sudden rise has caused a severe storage components shortage. Hard drives and SSDs are in high demand, and many stores are running out of stock. It's a similar anomaly that is also observed with bitcoin, which requires top-notch GPUs for mining.

The cryptocurrency market is also uncertain, but companies are now striving to find a unique selling point, gradually adding fundamentals to an otherwise speculative investment.


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