Chia ($CHIA) Cryptocurrency Helps Drive Shares of Hard-Drive Makers

Chia is a brand-new cryptocurrency developed by Bram Cohen, who most individuals know because the creator of the p2p filesharing protocol BitTorrent.

The timing of the launch is auspicious. As a result of we’re on this enormous crypto bull market (the previous few days however), the brand new coin already has a completely diluted market cap of nearly $28 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Much more notable, maybe, is that Chia makes use of a safety mannequin that advertises itself as less energy-intensive than traditional mining, which, because of Elon Musk, is out of the blue a factor that lots of people are very centered on. 

Setting apart Chia’s fundamental claims, it’s clear that enthusiasm over the coin is operating sky excessive. And that enthusiasm is bleeding over into demand for laborious drives, that are used to mine the coin. This piece from DataCenterDynamics notes that persons are snapping up solid-state drives, resulting in some shortages throughout Asia.

In order that in flip is having an impact on hard-drive makers. Shares of each Western Digital and Seagate have been hovering on the perceived demand.

After all, this is similar phenomenon we’ve seen elsewhere in chipworld, with annoyed avid gamers unable to get Nvidia graphics playing cards resulting from their demand amongst Ethereum miners. Normally, it’s getting tougher and tougher to speak concerning the scarcity of semiconductors without talking about the crypto boom. 

Talking of Nvidia chips you can see on StockX that the value of a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Version Graphics Card — which is thought to be an Ethereum mining powerhouse — is promoting for all-time highs within the aftermarket at practically 300% the unique checklist value.