Market capitalization: $ 270 million (* as of January 3)

The Chia Network had a spectacular launch on crypto exchanges this year, sparking hopes of being the next Bitcoin, but has settled down to just 10% of that price in a month.

In an innovative approach that avoids the energy-intensive mining used by Bitcoin, Chia decided to use the available storage space on hard drives instead. This mechanism of securing its blockchain was called proof of space and time (PoST), which has been praised as being environmentally friendly when compared to CPU and GPU usage.

But then we saw a demonstration of why we can’t have nice things, when the Chia experience expanded beyond just using existing available storage space. The “farmers” of Chia wrote “plots” to mine Chia coins on a large scale by purchasing all the hard drives available in the market.

They hoped readers would cash in on future profits from crypto. This tripled the prices of the few hard drives and SSDs still available, leaving them out of the reach of home users. This practice of the farmers of Chia has even led brands to reduce warranties on SSDs, which are generally known to have a longer lifespan than hard drives.

In the end, while Chia was a good proof of concept, there weren’t a lot of use cases, so speculation declined and the price of Chia’s coin plummeted. However, we can still go back and look at Chia in a few years, just like we look at the early days of Bitcoin mining today.