Pool Feature – Space Pool – Chia Decentral

Today we are excited to catch up with Caleb Curry, the face of Space Pool. Space Pool came out with a bang as the largest pool after a few days on the official pool protocol. Their pool has scaled to over 23,000 farmers and 150PiB+ of space at the time of this post.

Caleb was one of the early content creators that featured Chia farming and it likely responsible for a large part of the netspace boom. Space Pool is a community favorite with a large and engaged discord community and we’re happy to feature their pool today.

Chia Decentral: So we know you were one of the first content creators to really embrace Chia, but can you introduce yourself and your team’s background?

Space Pool: I’m Caleb, the guy behind the Coin Breakthrough Channel and Space Pool. I create crypto and software development videos on YouTube. I took the dive into cryptocurrency as it was my hobby and I wanted to take it more seriously. 

My software channel on YouTube is approaching 400K subscribers. I have a significant amount of experience in making complex topics simple and engaging. I consider myself to be an expert in technical content, social media, digital marketing, and community development. 

Sean is a legendary software engineer. He has the skills needed to build mission critical applications with security and scalability being top priority. 

Edgar is an experienced software engineer and technical lead for multiple engineering teams. Delivering successful products is his expertise. 

We have experience at IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook. We knew we would build a successful pool because together we had the exact skills needed to build, deploy, and market large scale software. We are all very passionate about new crypto projects and love every minute of running Space Pool and interacting with the community. 

Chia Decentral: How did you and your team find Chia? 

Space Pool: I discovered Chia prior to mainnet when I was researching new coins. Chia captivated me as I saw it as a new way to do crypto mining and saw it as an opportunity to support a cryptocurrency network from the very beginning. I’ve always been very involved in the Chia community and met lots of great people and Chia companies, including Chia Decentral!

Chia Decentral: What motivated you to start a pool? 

Space Pool: After creating Chia plotting and farming videos I quickly realized the content was becoming less relevant as the netspace grew. It started to become unreasonable to compete as a small farmer. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I had to do something.

I announced on the YouTube channel that I would either create a Chia pool or collaborate with a solid pool. Having found Space Pool, I obviously decided to go the route of creating a pool. I didn’t understand the challenge this would be and there is no way I could have done it alone. Us at Space Pool have been working day and night to make the best Chia pool there is.

It’s amazing to see my journey in Chia come to fruition with Space Pool being the largest pool following the official Chia pooling protocol. 

Chia Decentral: What will be your differentiator and a reason for users to choose Space Pool?

Space Pool: We believe our primary differentiator is a much better product. We delivered on time with thorough testing and security checks. While most other pools launched more of an MVP, we launched a fully featured website where farmers can clearly see the partials they’ve submitted and view the status of their farm along with mobile apps for iOS and Android, and all of that translated into 18 languages.

Beyond product features, we believe Space Pool is the true pool of the people. We focused first on the small farmer and have built a community boasting over 30K members. We are constantly taking user feedback and integrating new features and capabilities into the web app and mobile apps. 

We’ve done a lot of creative things to keep farmers engaged. We’ve built discord notifications for block rewards, have a list of amazing mods (Mission Control) who are obsessed with Chia and helping others, have chat channels for 30 languages, extensive FAQ bot commands, and channels for farmers to show off their farms. On top of this, we participate every day in direct engagement through avenues like messaging, voice chat, AMAs, polls, and more. We are regularly taking contributions from the community such as with content translations and feature requests. 

Chia Decentral: Can you give us a breakdown on your payout structure, fees, community incentives and any other highlights that are worth mentioning. 

Space Pool: We follow a PPLNS payout structure.This means when a block is won, we look at the last valid N partials (shares) submitted by all users in the Pool and distribute the block reward value based on your share among those N partials, taking into account the number of partials and the difficulty of each valid partial. This share is then credited towards your “Unpaid Balance”.

The minimum payout is 0.01 XCH and payments are made with each block won. We currently have zero fees. We will move to a 1% fee in the future, but we are trying to give farmers everything we can right now. Farmers are giving us a chance to be their pool of choice and 0% fees is our way of saying thanks. 

Once fees are 1%, we will be offering a loyalty program for lower fees based on how long you’ve been with Space Pool and how much storage you provide.

Chia Decentral: Any other plans, secret or otherwise for the Chia ecosystem you have in the works? 

Space Pool: We are currently building out an extensive system for notifications to manage your farm. For example, be notified when your farm connection is degraded or disconnected. This will integrate with the mobile app to ensure your contribution to the Chia Network is always counted. 

Chia Decentral: Any closing thoughts on the project, pools, the future of Chia?

Space Pool: We’re very excited to see Chia being delivered to the thousands of farmers who have been patiently waiting for pools. This is just the beginning for Chia and we are so excited to see what comes next.  

Do you have anything else you’d like to plug and where can people find you on the internet?

Space Pool: We would be ecstatic if you gave Space Pool a try. Join us over at pool.space (https://pool.space) or find us on discord (https://discord.gg/spacepool). Happy Farming!