2020 – 2026 · Washington State
Emergent Coin built Nucle, the first decentralized Chia wallet, ran the PoolChia and CloudChia services, and grew its own hardware from GPUs on a bookshelf to a data center in Woodinville, WA.
The story
Dec 2020
Dustin started farming Chia on ten laptops plotting about 10 TB a day. Scaling up onto Dell PowerEdge R820s is how he met Chen.
Jan 2021
Founded after news of the Chia testnet launch. The first hardware lived at home: open-air frames of GeForce RTX cards from Zotac, Gigabyte and EVGA, cooled by walls of Antec fans.
Mar–Apr 2021
CloudChia pooled investor capital into shared farming hardware that Emergent Coin built and ran. Version 1 launched in March and a larger version 2 in April.
Spring 2021
The farm moved to Redmond and grew into racks: StarTech frames of R820 plotters labeled PLOTTER01 and up, HGST 60-bay JBOD shelves, Tripp Lite UPS power and a box fan for cooling.
May 2021
Emergent Coin, Inc. was formed as a Delaware C corporation on May 10. Within two weeks PoolChia.com launched as a farming pool for the network, free for the first month and 1% after.
Jul–Dec 2021
The wallet project, first called Vencor, became Nucle: the first decentralized SPV wallet for Chia, funded through a Chia Network grant. It shipped in December 2021 as a web app plus Android and iOS apps.
Oct–Nov 2021
To fund Nucle's mobile apps, the team took on a contract with a game studio: a Unity card-battle prototype and an on-chain proof of concept on Flow for minting, trading and merging warrior-card NFTs.
2021–2026
Headquarters and the main data center settled in Woodinville, Washington, and grew to 7 petabytes: Supermicro 1U NVMe nodes, 36-bay 4U storage servers and HGST 4U60 JBODs filled with 14 TB drives. Five top-of-the-line Supermicro AMD EPYC servers joined in 2022.
Expansion
Emergent Coin added colocation with BitCap in Eastern Washington, and Bitcoin ASICs such as the Antminer T17 joined the fleet.
2026
Emergent Coin ran the 7 PB facility through its full lifecycle for 20+ investors, from build-out to end-of-life decommissioning. The operating experience carried forward into Fourward Systems.
Inside the data center
What we built
The first decentralized SPV wallet for Chia
A self-custody wallet: users created or restored a wallet and their keys never left their device. It started in 2021 as Vencor, was funded by a Chia Network grant, and shipped in December 2021 on the web at wallet.nucle.io and as Android and iOS apps.
More on Nucle →
Farming pool for Chia
Pooled farming, so smaller farmers earned steady rewards instead of waiting for a lucky block. Free for the first month and 1% after. Known for its pixel-art brand, merch and a deck of trading cards that taught Chia concepts like plots and pools.
poolchia.com →Shared farming infrastructure
Investors bought into shared Chia farming hardware that Emergent Coin built, hosted and operated. It ran from the first version in March 2021 until the facility was decommissioned.
Client work, Oct–Nov 2021
A Unity card-battle prototype plus a Flow blockchain proof of concept: mint warrior cards as NFTs, trade them between accounts, and merge two cards into a stronger one. Delivered in two phases, Oct 28 and Nov 10, 2021.
Nucle · 2021
Nucle was the first decentralized SPV wallet for Chia: a light client that verified the chain itself instead of trusting a server, with keys that never left the user's device. Emergent Coin built it under a Chia Network Cultivation Grant and shipped it in December 2021.
Create or restore a wallet in the browser or on a phone. Seeds were generated and stored on the device, never on Emergent Coin servers.
An SPV design that verified Chia data itself, tuned for mobile. Optimizing that for iOS was the hardest engineering problem of the build.
The team paused the launch for roughly three weeks of internal AppSec testing before release, then published the code as open source.
The V2 roadmap added Chia Asset Tokens and stablecoins, offers for peer-to-peer trades, and CatForge, a tool for minting test tokens.
From the archive
The original site went up on May 21, 2021, the same week Emergent Coin incorporated and PoolChia launched. Its promise: building the green crypto community and ecosystem.
Gallery
Founders
Co-founder & CEO
Dustin co-founded Emergent Coin and ran its infrastructure end to end: the first rigs at home, the Redmond racks, and the 7 PB Woodinville data center through decommissioning. He now runs Fourward Systems in Seattle, which owns and operates dedicated NVIDIA GPU infrastructure in U.S. colocation.
Co-founder · DevOps & Development
Chen co-founded Emergent Coin and led DevOps and development: the plotting fleet, the pool backend and the operations tooling behind PoolChia and CloudChia.
Robert Green
Co-founder & advisor
Yue Zhou
Co-founder · Head of Engineering
Zicheng (Jimmy) Wang
DeFi & pooling product
Ivan (Ye) Hong
Co-founder · UX & design