We are very excited to feature Flexpool! The fast growing, Ethereum mining pool has been working diligently to build a robust pooling option for Chia. In a community with so many groups new to crypto, it’s great to see Chia expand in to some of the entrenched crypto communities.
Flexpool was a new-comer to the Ethereum mining space in 2020 and has since seen huge growth in not just hashrate but the community within the pool. Alex and Chris are two of the few Ethereum community members taking a firm stance against the surprisingly uncontroversial EIP-1559 set to launch in August https://medium.com/flexpool/flexpool-announces-its-position-against-eip-1559-heres-why-c5275b7c4465. Their forward thinking team will be very beneficial to the Chia eco-system with their past crypto experience and excellent development team. I am very excited to see, not just what they come up with from a pool product, but also what other projects they plan to build within the Chia space.
Flexpool is now officially live with a bonus 2 XCH per day added to the pool for the first week.
I caught up with Chris from the Flexpool team to introduce their project to the Chia community.
Chia Decentral: Tell us about your team, your background, experience in crypto?
Flexpool: Alex is our lead developer. He started exploring crypto years ago and started up Flexpool early in 2020. He spent months getting it into shape and developing both the backend and frontend himself. He is a very experienced and hard working developer and because he works for himself he doesn’t get paid overtime despite working close to 100 hours a week. I (Chris) came onboard later in early 2021 and tookover the marketing/customer relations. I have more of a business background and saw a great product with a very talented/hard working developer. I come from building maintenance so I’ve learned this all on the fly going from one GPU on nicehash back in July 2020 to a couple rigs in 2021. Currently learning some Python so I can finally understand what people are saying. We expanded quickly in ETH going from 17GH/s at the start of 2021 to the 6.8TH/s of today.
Chia Decentral: How did you and your team find Chia?
Flexpool: We found Chia thanks to our moderators and miners talking about it constantly such that our ETH mining discord became a Chia discord. This resulted in us looking at Chia for ourselves and wanting to farm it (as both Alex and I have ETH mining rigs along with operating a pool).
Chia Decentral: What motivated you to start a pool?
Flexpool: We only began thinking of launching a pool for Chia later once it became bigger and we got a lot of requests to do so. What motivated us to back Chia is that we saw a developer team that is committed to the project and who is doing things differently through a legal public US corporation which is something new that BTC and ETH hasn’t done. We believe Chia will be long-term and that its price will soar in the future simply because its the natural coin for citizens to adopt in the future because its gone through the legal hoops that others have avoided.
Chia Decentral: What will be your differentiator and a reason for users to choose Flexpool?
Flexpool: I think a lot of Chia Farmers are also ETH miners and they will feel more comfortable farming to a pool they recognize and trust. In the end we’ve held millions of $’s in ETH before and we are a legal Canadian company. We’ve been around and while we have had issues we’ve always sought to fix them and makeup for them. As well, we developed our pool in Golang using our experience from ETH rather than patch together something with the reference code in Python. This will allow us to offer a similar experience to mining ETH with stat tracking and share submission. We will also be able to scale to handle all Chia farmers. I don’t know what most other pools are doing on the developer side (HPool is doing something similar to us in Golang I believe) but I suspect most aren’t prepared to expand on the reference code to accommodate the burden of more than a few hundred farmers (which is all the reference code can accommodate before crashing). We also monitor our servers 24/7 through two shifts so if there is downtime we can immediately seek to fix things.
Chia Decentral: Can you give us a breakdown on your payout structure, fees, community incentives and any other highlights that are worth mentioning.
Flexpool: We’ve been focused on development so we haven’t decided our fees or incentives. We have discussed a bonus during the first week and possibly donating a percentage of profits to farm animal adoption centers like the Happy Herd Farm Sanctuary but nothing has been finalized.
Chia Decentral: Any other plans, secret or otherwise for the Chia ecosystem you have in the works?
Flexpool: We are sponsoring/working on some initiatives on Chia to help farmers, Chia users, and Chia itself. madMAx’s Chia plotter is probably one of the more famous ones, it’s a great project and we’re happy to support his work. As part of our pooling we developed our own wallet in Golang and CLVM libraries. The wallet includes a gas oracle and message signing. We’re planning to add a basic GUI and to release it open source for others to build on. We will likely release the CLVM libraries at some point in the future. We have submitted a GoChia node implementation project to the Hackathon. A node in Go will be much improved over the current one and will greatly boost Chia’s use/utility/stability.
Chia Decentral: Any closing thoughts on the project, pools, the future of Chia?
Flexpool: Likely we will see farms consolidate around 5-10 pools. There are a lot of issues with the reference pool code, it was not meant to be used, only referred to. Most will need to restrict users. Most will downtime, possibly even us.
You can get started with Flexpool here https://www.flexpool.io/get-started and find their team on Discord https://discord.gg/uDeWuQ7p
