Projects that wander are not always lost.
XCHcentral has wandered, a lot. (But hopefully, no longer)
When we began XCHcentral, Katie and I (JM) had a clear vision and path. Create a central location for information and projects in the Chia community.
Before we even launched that version of the site, we wandered.
The Wandering
Our first detour was after the launch of the official pooling protocol in July 2021. For those of you who were farming during this time, you probably remember daily baseless claims on Twitter and Reddit accusing pool operators of underpaying or cheating earnings. (To be fair, outside of the major pools, there was at least one pool operator that admitted to lying about their pool's netspace)
Seeing an opportunity to develop a project that would fill a need in the community, we wandered.
We launched our Chia Pools project that tracked and published the payouts of our anonymous 10Tib farms with the major pools. (more on our decision to spin down the project in another post soon™... probably)
While maintaining the pooling project, which required a little more babysitting than we initially thought, we decided to wander a little more.
In private, we scoped and prototyped everything from a CAT database to a full on explorer. In the end, we came to the conclusion that either, there was already a team in the community operating a similar project well, or that the two of us weren't going to be able to scale a certain project at the quality level we wanted while maintaining our individual careers, family obligations, and some semblance of a social life outside of the Chia community. (I could only get away with – "pair coding by candlelight counts as a romantic date" for so long)
Suffering from a little burnout and frustration, we sat down and examined what types of projects will be the most sustainable for us going forward.
We were tired of wandering.
The Paths Forward
Ultimately we decided that we wanted to take multiple paths forward.
XCHcentral Blog - Reboot
The first path is what you're viewing now, a relaunched XCHcentral blog.
This will be a largely JM driven project. I love interacting with the community, learning from the expert engineers we have committed to Chia, and building new relationships. The content I'll look to cover here will largely reflect those broad interests. Additionally, there will almost certainly be more than a few posts about non-Chia topics like other blockchains, NFTs, and some meta posts about creating content in general. (you can almost certainly expect Green Horizon NFT update posts / more art process content from Katie... and maybe even some writing process posts from our writer Parker)
Despite what you might be inferring from this lengthy (and hopefully somewhat entertaining) post, I'm new to writing and can easily get caught up in a perpetual editing/revision loop. We'll do our best to avoid that.
That being said, if there's a topic you think needs more attention or if you have a community project you'd love to talk about, let me know! Tweet at or DM me on Twitter @XCHcentral_jm / or DM on keybase xchcentral_jm.
Green Horizon NFT
The other path we're excited to take is our Green Horizon NFT series.
Green Horizon is our premium NFT series we're launching on Chia. We'll be featuring both 1/1 hand painted oil on canvas profile pictures by our own Katie, as well as numbered limited edition "prints" of scenes to accompany the original short stories bring written by our head writer Parker.
Follow us @GreenHorizon so you don't miss out on any updates or behind the scenes releases!
We'll definitely have a full introduction post to the series soon™.
Artist at work - @xchcentral_kt
First layer of color above the underpainting.
Green Horizon
Original oil art to be minted on @chia_project, accompanied by original short stories written by - @Parkersaidit
Give them both a follow for more art!#NFT #nftart #art #oilpainting pic.twitter.com/97zZBM77xS— Green Horizon 🌱 (@GreenHorizonNFT) May 22, 2022
Thank You
Finally, we just wanted to offer a thank you again to the Chia Network team, and the overall Chia community. It's been a blast for the past year, and we're looking forward to many more. This change in direction has us back to having a ton of fun and we hope you all are too!
If you feel like supporting our projects, Donations of XCH / CATs can be sent to:
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