Chia (XCH)

Bram Cohen and BitTorrent: a programmer from New York’s Upper West Side, who had learned BASIC at age five and attended Stuyvesant High School, wrote a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol in April 2001 that by 2009 accounted for 43 to 70 percent of all internet traffic.

BitTorrent proved empirically that decentralized networks could scale to hundreds of millions of users, a proof that made Bitcoin conceptually credible. MIT Technology Review named Cohen to its TR35 list. Time named him one of the 100 Most Influential People. He is also one of the world’s top-selling puzzle designers, a detail that reveals the mind behind the architecture: someone who thinks in systems, constraints, and elegant solutions to complex problems.

In August 2017, Cohen looked at Bitcoin and saw the same thing he had seen in Napster sixteen years earlier: a system that worked but that consumed resources with reckless inefficiency. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mining consumed more electricity than many countries, concentrating power among corporations that could afford enormous energy bills and specialized hardware. Cohen’s insight was characteristically direct: replace computational work with storage space.

Instead of burning electricity to solve mathematical puzzles, let farmers fill unused hard drive space with cryptographic plots and then passively check those plots against network challenges. The energy cost drops to 0.16 percent of Bitcoin’s. The barrier to entry drops from million-dollar mining operations to unused hard drive space on a consumer computer. The result was proof-of-space-and-time, the first new Nakamoto-style consensus algorithm since Bitcoin itself.

Cohen’s co-founder and CEO, Gene Hoffman, brought credentials that are unique in the cryptocurrency industry and connect directly to the cypherpunk heritage. At PGP, Hoffman personally exported the PGP Source Code book in 1997, helping challenge and ultimately lift United States export controls on strong encryption. This was one of the landmark cypherpunk victories that made Bitcoin and every subsequent cryptocurrency legally possible. In 1998, Hoffman co-founded eMusic.com, one of the first companies to sell music as digital downloads, three years before iTunes. eMusic went public on NASDAQ in 1999. Hoffman was featured on the Forbes cover. In 2001, he led eMusic’s acquisition by Vivendi Universal for approximately $24.6 million. Career total: over $215 million raised, four companies acquired, three sold, one of the youngest public company CEOs in United States history. When Hoffman joined Chia, he brought not just business experience but the specific cypherpunk credential of having personally advanced the legal right to strong encryption.

Chia Network raised $61 million in May 2021 from Andreessen Horowitz, Slow Ventures, Breyer Capital, and Naval Ravikant. Mainnet launched March 19, 2021. Chialisp, a custom smart transaction language, is designed for auditability and security.

Chia Offers enable decentralized peer-to-peer trading with no counterparty risk. The Chia Cloud Wallet, reaching general release in early 2026, enables XCH acquisition via ACH bank transfers, bridging cryptocurrency directly to the traditional banking system.

Every other proof-of-work coin evaluated in this analysis secures its network through computational competition: miners race to solve mathematical puzzles, consuming electricity proportional to the security they provide. Cohen replaced this model with one that uses storage space instead of computation.

Farmers fill hard drives with cryptographic plots, pre-computed solutions to potential challenges. When the network issues a challenge, farmers check their stored plots. The farmer whose plot contains the closest match to the challenge wins the right to create the next block. The process is passive: once the plots are created, farming requires minimal electricity and no specialized hardware beyond hard drives.

The environmental advantage is dramatic. Bitcoin’s annual energy consumption rivals that of medium-sized countries. Chia’s energy consumption is 0.16 percent of Bitcoin’s.

In a world increasingly concerned about cryptocurrency’s environmental footprint, Chia’s proof-of-space-and-time offers the same Nakamoto-style consensus security without the energy cost that has drawn regulatory scrutiny and public criticism to proof-of-work mining.

Farming rewards follow a halving schedule: 64 XCH per ten minutes for the first three years, halving to 32 in years four through six, with subsequent halvings every three years.

Circulating supply is approximately 14.4 million XCH as of March 2026, excluding the 21 million XCH strategic reserve held by Chia Network Inc. Total supply is approximately 33 to 35 million. Core version 2.6.1 was released March 18, 2026, with version 2.7.0 expected to include preliminary proof-of-space-2 plot support.

Chia’s most significant real-world deployment is the World Bank’s Climate Action Data Trust, operated in partnership with the International Emissions Trading Association and the government of Singapore. The Climate Action Data Trust runs on the Chia blockchain, tracking carbon credits across global voluntary markets.

This is not a pilot program or a proof of concept. It is the most significant institutional blockchain deployment by any evaluated coin other than Bitcoin, operated by the world’s most important development bank for one of the most consequential environmental challenges of the century.

Permuto Capital is pursuing SEC approval for tokenized securities on Chia, which if approved would represent a regulatory breakthrough for blockchain-based securities issuance. The combination of the World Bank’s Climate Action Data Trust and Permuto’s tokenized securities positions Chia uniquely at the intersection of institutional legitimacy and blockchain innovation.

No other coin in this portfolio can point to enterprise adoption of comparable institutional weight.

Chia is the most paradoxical coin evaluated in this analysis. The founder invented the technology that proved decentralized networks could scale, a contribution recognized as one of the essential predecessors to Bitcoin.

The CEO helped win the legal battle for strong encryption that made Bitcoin possible. The institutional backer, Andreessen Horowitz, is the most prestigious venture capital firm in technology. The enterprise partner, the World Bank, is the most important development institution on Earth. The technology, proof-of-space-and-time, is the first new Nakamoto-style consensus algorithm since Bitcoin. And the market values the entire enterprise at $37 million.

The paradox resolves only if you understand the strategic reserve. A coin whose corporate parent holds more coins than the entire public market, and is actively selling them, is a coin whose price cannot reflect its fundamentals until the selling pressure subsides. The technology is proven. The enterprise adoption is real. The founder credentials are unmatched. The tokenomics are the constraint. The intelligent investor who believes in Chia’s long-term potential must make a judgment about when, or whether, the strategic reserve dynamic changes. If it does, the CFV of $1,386.81 represents what the fundamentals support.

If it does not, the fundamentals are offset by a dilution mechanism that no amount of World Bank partnership or BitTorrent pedigree can overcome.

XI. Why I Chose Chia to Tokenize My CoinFunds

I need to declare a personal interest in this analysis that goes beyond the CFV analysis. Bram Cohen has been a hero of mine since before Bitcoin existed, and my history with the technology he created runs deeper than most readers would expect.

In the mid-2000s, I had a deal to purchase eight of the largest torrent sites in the world for $80 million. The team I recruited to execute the acquisition was not assembled from the cryptocurrency community, which did not yet exist, but from the highest levels of the internet industry. I recruited Claudio Pincus and George Lichter, who had served as Chairman and CEO of Ask Jeeves when it was sold to Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp for $1.85 billion.

I recruited Rob Wrubel, the founding CEO of Ask Jeeves, and David Warthen, the original CTO and co-founder. Lichter and Pincus had secured $80 million in funding through an investment bank to complete my rollup, and we had a vision that was a decade ahead of its time.

We met with Dean Garfield, the executive vice president and chief strategy officer of the MPAA, and Jack Valenti, who had served as President and CEO of the MPAA for 38 years. We also met with representatives of the RIAA. My pitch was simple: there were 75 million people downloading 500 million media files per month on these torrent networks. They were black hats. I proposed turning them into white hats by offering superior digital content with a legal framework, charging consumers a monthly subscription fee or charging advertisers for access to an audience that was already consuming media at an unprecedented scale. We could convert the largest piracy audience in the world into the largest legitimate digital media audience in the world.

The MPAA and RIAA declined. They preferred litigation over innovation. The deal was never completed. We never attempted to purchase BitTorrent itself, which Bram Cohen owned and later sold. But the vision was sound: within a few years, Vudu, Hulu, Amazon Video, and every streaming service that followed would prove that consumers would pay for convenient, legal digital content delivered over the internet. We were there at the bleeding edge, proposing the model before the infrastructure existed to support it, and the industry chose to fight the future rather than build it.

This history is why I trust Bram Cohen and Gene Hoffman with the most important operational decision in the CFV CoinFund’s structure: the tokenization of the fund’s interests on the Chia blockchain. The CFV CoinFund’s limited partnership interests will be tokenized and tradable on Chia, giving investors the ability to trade their fund positions peer-to-peer using Chia’s native asset capabilities without intermediaries, without the delays of traditional fund redemption processes.

With the security of a blockchain built by the man who invented peer-to-peer file sharing and the man who helped win the legal right to strong encryption. I chose Chia for this purpose not because the CFV model told me to, but because I have watched Bram Cohen’s work for two decades. He built BitTorrent, the technology that proved decentralized networks could scale and that provided the architectural proof of concept as one of the essential predecessors to Bitcoin.

Gene Hoffman personally exported PGP source code to challenge the United States government’s classification of encryption as a munition, a cypherpunk act of defiance that made the entire cryptocurrency industry legally possible. When Hoffman was 24, he created one of the first digital music subscription services, sold it to Vivendi Universal, and the core technology of his MP3 player became part of the architecture of the first iPod. These are not anonymous developers or venture-funded marketing teams. These are builders whose work shaped the internet itself, and I trust them with the infrastructure of my fund because their track record is written into the history of technology.The tokenization of the CFV CoinFund on Chia is both a business decision and a personal one. It is a business decision because Chia’s Chialisp smart transaction language, proof-of-space-and-time consensus, and native asset capabilities provide the most secure and energy-efficient platform for tokenized securities.

It is a personal decision because the men who built Chia are the men whose work I have admired, studied, and attempted to build upon for twenty years. In an analysis that argues for valuing fundamentals over narrative, I want the reader to know that this choice was made on both grounds: the fundamentals are sound, and the people are extraordinary.