Chia creators warn of potential vulnerability in the Hpool pool

Chia developer Bram Cohen has urged miners to abandon unofficial pools and announced the creation of his own protocol by the end of May.

Update on Chia pooling protocol development: We’re working on the whole shebang: plotting, pooling, GUI, and testing end-to-end on testnet. Unfortunately it won’t be ready by this coming Monday, but it will be done before the end of this month.

— Bram Cohen (@bramcohen) May 14, 2021

Miners are currently pooling in pools not controlled by the Chia Network. The largest is the Chinese Hpool, with a total hashrate of 2.2 exabytes. An address belonging to the pool holds more than 33% of all mined coins.

Chia Network warned that the client from Hpool is not built on the official protocol and may potentially contain malware.

The official code for pools will be presented on the testnet by the end of May. It will support trusted pools with low fees, between which users will be able to switch.

To join the protocol, miners will need to create new, transitional plots.

“What people are doing right now is damn unsafe and frightening. If you have ever handed your private keys to a pool, I suggest creating a new wallet, moving everything into it, and waiting for the release of our protocol,” Bram Cohen wrote, adding that he does not plan to launch an official pool.

The Chia Network is based on the Proof-of-Space and Proof-of-Time consensus algorithms [proofs of space and time].

As of writing, the total disk space occupied by the Chia cryptocurrency exceeds 6.8 exabytes. The price of XCH is $1,321.

Earlier, The9 Ltd signed agreements to purchase equipment for mining Chia and to lease cloud services for a total of more than $5.7 million. Upon completion of the deal The9 will obtain approximately 130 pebibytes of disk space.

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