We all know and love the Chia Fork known as Flax (XFX). Straightforward and honest, the Green Giant came along with a simple message; For the community, Chia clone and low 300,000 Premine (not sent to Gene and Bram). For a lot of us, Flax was our first Fork love and was how I discovered the Chia Fork Farming Community.
The first thing that appealed to me about Flax was that it seemed very community based and the Developer was quite communicative on Discord with this community. FlaxSeed and the Flax Fork is still the main Fork behemoth, but lately it seems our gentle giant has started to slumber downwards…but is that really the case, or were we all way to over optimistic in the early days.
First lets discuss why so many of us believe in Flax. It is simple really, Flax claims it will mirror Chia and in a sense, Flax is “ChiaLite”, a true direct Fork but without the insane 21 million Premine that Chia has. So this is what originally excited me about Flax, because long term, one has to consider that anything Chia does, Flax will follow. Does this mean Flax can replace Chia for application case use? Certainly. But will it…well if we knew answers to where any of this Fork farming would lead, we would all be driving Lambos because that would be knowing the future…and we do not.
We saw in the early days, as Fork Trading began and as Chia Fork Traders became the primary trading space for Fork Farmers and Traders alike, Flax had prices around $4 and even breached into the $5+ range for a few days. A lot of us likely had predictions and visions of this trend continuing as we saw the difficulty level rising and seeing it was not going to be easy to farm a massive amount of Flax. Myself with my 420 plots saw that ETW creep from a day, to two days…to a week…and I realized that to get in on the XFX action, I was going to need to buy it.
But the price did not hold up. Even though, still today, Flax is used heavily in trading between Forks and we even use Flax as a pseudo “peg” for the other forks for the Exchange and such, XFX has slowly crept downwards to where it is commonly seen to trade around $1.50 USDT mean value. Is the bleeding over? Maybe. I did not want to sell my XFX for $5 a few weeks ago and I sure am not selling it for $1.50 either. But I am in it for the long run and Flax suffers from the long road forward with no “sink” for it (see my Silicoin tSIT post for more about this). Speculation is light now, people have what they want to hold of it and many still approach Flax with a “farm it and sell it” type of short term thinking and this will continue I believe. This is also a fundamental problem of most Chia farmers also and the “wen poolz” crowd. The SpacePool emperor wears no clothes unfortunately.
The problem is that those of us who are HODL and long on XFX are now playing things smart. Flax is going to be around for a long time and there is little reason to expect any major news from our favorite Fork to cause a price rise. The price is doing what the rest of the Forks are doing; trying to figure out consensus of its perceived market value. It is determining, for many, where is the price “too low” to sell and “too high” to buy and then we will see it begin to average out. I think that point is coming soon, as we have seen some of the younger forks find their sweet spot and turn their downfall around in the last few days. But those of us who do want to play XFX long, we realize that XFX has been trending downwards, similar like most of the Fork prices and there is a large chance it will continue to do so until a happy bottom is found and then and only then will speculation and demand begin to possibly lift it upwards. But without dramatic news or something that kicks things into overdrive in either the Chia world, Forks world or even more specifically, the price of XCH, I think we all have visions of stocking up on our beloved Flax at the bottom of it’s “settling”. I could be wrong of course, but that is still my insight into acquiring more.
Here is the other thing we must consider about XFX and the current trade price. It could be related to the XCH price decline we saw the last few weeks as well. When XFX was at $5, XCH was north of $300. Now we see XCH down more than 30% since then and XFX has declined at a very similar pace. Maybe the two are more married than we have thought.
Other major thing everyone needs to consider is that the Flax Netspace growth has slowed down quite a bit since about July 10th, 2021 when it crosses the 2 EiB point. Up until then, it grew very quickly. Now since then, 2 weeks later and we are sitting around 2.5 EiB and the growth line has become more flat. It reminds me of Chia’s Netspace growth which has also flat-lined more or less the last few weeks or so. July 10th, 2021 was also around the same time that XFX was trading at its high point for it’s history. This may be more than coincidence. I am actually amazed though that Flax growth slowed down at all. We still see that less than 8% of Chia farmers are farming Flax and farming Flax has literally zero downside. The 80/20 rules should be relative here and I had always felt the Flax Netspace growth would slow once 20% of Chia Farmers moved in on it. Granted, the Chia purists who control those communities have been semi-vigilant in suppressing information about Flax and Chia forks, but it is hard to keep information out of the hands of those who want to farm to make money. People have a way of finding out.
Flax still remains the Green Giant of the Fork world however. The next Fork even close to the Flax Netspace is (laughably) SpareCoin and I have a hard time wrapping my head around that. Both ChainGreen and Silicoin have way more going for them, trade at a relatively higher value and are generally liked by the community far more. Even so, SpareCoin has not even passed the 1 EiB threshold, not even 40% the Netspace of Flax.
I would not be too quick to bet against Flax however. This is the legacy elephant in the room, the Alt-Chia if you will and counting Flax out too soon could leave a lot of people smarting poorly when things take a turn to the North. I am sure it will, I just do not think it is today. My opinion on Flax is: HOLD, with a presence to know when it might be time to start to Buy for the long game at value.
(Not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. Azile simply exists in Cyberpunk 2077 and looks at the moon wondering if that is where the Lambo was last parked.)