Chia

Chia Network Inc. was founded in August 2017 by Bram Cohen — creator of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol — together with co-founder Ryan Singer, with a mission to build a blockchain 'less wasteful, more decentralized, and more secure' than Bitcoin. Chia's core technical innovation is Proof of Space and Time (PoST): instead of energy-intensive mining hardware, 'farmers' allocate unused hard-drive or SSD storage to secure the network. Ryan Singer served as first CEO before stepping down in June 2019 to focus on family, at which point Bram Cohen took over as CEO. Chia raised early funding from a syndicate including Naval Ravikant, Greylock, and True Ventures (a $3.4M seed round in March 2018), followed by a $5M strategic round in August 2020, and a landmark $61M round in May 2021 led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Richmond Global Ventures, valuing the company at roughly $500 million. The Chia mainnet and XCH token launched on May 3, 2021, triggering a well-publicized global shortage of hard drives and SSDs as farmers rushed to allocate storage. Chia announced plans to IPO before the end of 2021 but the offering did not materialize amid the 2022 crypto downturn; the company laid off roughly a third of its staff in 2023. On January 1, 2023, Bram Cohen moved from CEO to Chairman/Founder/CTO, while Gene Hoffman — a former Chia board advisor and previously co-founder/CEO of Vindicia (sold to Amdocs) — became President and CEO to professionalize the organization ahead of a renewed IPO push. Chia filed a confidential draft S-1 in April 2023, with second and third submissions in March and August 2024. As of a leaked March 2025 draft S-1, the company remained unprofitable with minimal revenue, drawn from three paying enterprise partners: the World Bank Group, Climate Action Data Trust, and Data Vault Holdings. The company's path to profitability has become tied to Permuto Capital, a related joint venture led by Gene Hoffman pursuing SEC-regulated tokenized equity/ETF products. As of mid-2026, Chia Network remains privately held and has not completed an IPO; XCH trades far below its 2021 peak.

Business model

B2B blockchain infrastructure and enterprise services: enabling tokenization, custody, and trading of real-world assets (carbon credits, equities) on the Chia blockchain; revenue also derived from sale of 'prefarmed' XCH tokens.

Enterprise/partner fees for blockchain tokenization and registry services, prefarm XCH token sales for operating capital, and planned fee revenue from Permuto Capital tokenized equity trusts.