Legendary coder Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, has announced that is working on a new cryptocurrency named Chia.
A new company has emerged named Chia Network which tuts on its website front page :
We're building a blockchain based on proofs of space and time to make a cryptocurrency which is less wasteful, more decentralized, and more secure.
The Chia cryptocurrency will be based on proofs of time and storage, in contrast to bitcoin’s power-hungry proofs of work. Essentially, Chia will harness cheap and abundant unused storage space on hard drives to verify its blockchain.
“I’m not the first person to come up with this idea,” says Cohen, but the actual implementation of this project requires the kind of advanced computer science he is specialized in.
After the invention of the torrent in the early 2000s and a brief passage from Steam for Valve, Cohen had been at BitTorrent building a new protocol for peer-to-peer live video transfer. He left BitTorrent in early August to start Chia Network but remains on the board of advisors.
Cohen has teamed up with early bitcoin exchange Tradehill’s COO Ryan Singer, and they’ve raised a seed round for Chia to ramp up hiring. Cohen wouldn’t say how much it had raised, laughing that, “I’m not sure how much we want to announce right now, but it was a very hot round.” The goal is to do some early sales of Chia in Q2 2018, with a full launch of its cryptocurrency by the end of 2018, though Cohen says that’s a stretch goal.
It seems Chia and its creator is trying to appeal to both cryptocurrency fans but also hardcore financial institutions.