Chia farming may be the answer Bitcoin home miners may have been searching for.
The SpaceFarmers pool has enabled XCH payout swaps to BTC, ETH, and more. Here’s my experience with it.
Farmers on SpaceFarmers can select an alternative crypto to swap into upon payout, fulfilled through SimpleSwap.
Currently BTC, ETH, TRX and XLM are supported for now, but technically anything can be added. My first test was with ETH. I’ve requested USDC and XNO to be added too.
At the daily payout time, within a few minutes ETH showed up in my wallet and the dashboard linked to a SimpleSwap confirmation page.
Notably in case of a failed swap, XCH will be refunded directly into the farming payout address, so either way you get your payout.
The fee from the swap looks to be about 1.5%, with part of that going towards the gas to send the ETH. I imagine this fee is higher for smaller swaps or for more expensive networks, and lower for larger swaps on cheaper or feeless networks (say XLM or XNO).
In the end, this feature is just another option for Chia farmers but can potentially attract new farmers too.
USDC swap support would be an interesting off-ramp for existing farmers while BTC, ETH or XNO could bring in interest from those respective communities.
Learning from other cryptos
Pre ETH merge, the pool2miners ETH pool had added XNO payouts, enabling Nano community members with a spare GPU lying around to earn XNO by mining ETH.
This is another chance for those folks to utilize spare storage space to stack XNO, but now at negligible electricity costs.
Home Bitcoin miners may have given up in the face of ASICs but BTC payouts from farming Chia could be their chance to stack sats while contributing to a decentralized network with similar ethos.
Evergreenminer might be the most profitable Bitcoin miner available!
All-in-all a great job by the SpaceFarmers team! Hit up their discord and ask to have this feature enabled for your launcher ID or wait until it’s fully public.
