As usual, thank you to the team at XCHweekly. It is an interesting read. Rethinking the original thesis for Chia from XCHWeekly.
Hello, subscribers. What a week. I was going to say “ugh” but at this point I don’t think there’s any word or words that can really do the current state of the world justice. Here’s to hoping things get better soon.
While it feels odd to not focus on the terrible things in the world, I also think there are enough professionals doing that and it’s my job to maybe bring a little bit of positivity to the Chia crew. So here goes…
I am one of those masochistic individuals that enjoys re-evaluating my thesis every now and then. I ask myself what still holds, what doesn’t, what’s new, and how I’d play this if I were an exec at x company. I’m not going to go into depth on all of those topics, but the last one proved fun while considering how Chia the company might be thinking about growth.
First, we already know that Chia does things differently. While most other “new” L1s launch into the noise with a copy/past/tweaked version of EVM and a war chest of capital to dump on influencers and devs, throwing regulatory cautions to the winds, Chia said “F that noise.” Chia launched a breakthrough innovation where anyone can run a full node on garbage hardware (literally, hardware that was heading to the dump), resulting in orders of magnitude greater decentralization and lower energy usage. They figured out how to make smart contracts work on the UTXO model. They developed a secure programming environment that changed the dev dynamic from “monkeys can code, but rocket scientists need to test to make sure it’s secure” to “you need to be smart to code, but then it’s fucking secure.” They opted out of showering money on devs (for now) and went after large deals, landing the World Bank and six countries for a potentially game-changing carbon credit platform. So no, Chia is not doing things “by the book.” In fact, it almost looks like a contrarian approach when compared to they hype only crap that quick-buck VCs look for these days.
Second, we know Chia can execute. While they say they didn’t plan for it, the early days of main net (stage 1) made it look like they were playing 6D chess. Yes, it’s been painful as hell for early adopters, with a painfully positive correlation between early-ness and level of conviction, but the ecosystem gained a lot from our agony. The early supply crunch led to insane prices, which led to insane network growth, which led to insane security and hype, which led to… the MFing World Bank, Costa Rica, Singapore, and four other countries.
Ok… So. We know Chia does things differently and they can execute. Stage 1 was baller. Now we enter stage 2: growth, and ponder “what is baller for stage 2?” Is it hyping and mooning during the bull market, with all the others? Is it paying lots of people to build on the platform? Is it sacrificing quality to get features out the door? No, no, and no. Want to know what’s really baller? Tracking geopolitical trends. Tracking regulatory developments. Knowing where the world is heading and waiting for the perfect moment. Launching groundbreaking products that solve real world problems and mooning when markets around the world are in panic mode.
Can Chia pull it off? I have no idea. But between Bram, Gene, the Chia team, and their network, they’ve got some legendary brainpower at work. We know they like to do things differently, and this would be one hell of a way to put Chia on the map.
Chia stats:
Price and Trading:
*note that CAT transactions on Spacescan have decreased. Since this is a cumulative number, it seems that an adjustment has been made. We’ll reach out to Spacescan to check on this.
End-user community
Developer community
*Note: Friday close is 1pm PT. Other stats are pulled Friday between 1pm PT and 10pm PT.
Chia (the company) news:
- Chia announced a “save the date” for a Q&A with JM next Friday (time TBD) to discuss “Chia, storage, and plotting.” I assume this means we’re probably up for a cool announcement sometime next week, but we’ll see. [more]
- Gene gave an update on Keybase as to why v1.3 is taking a bit longer than expected, stating “If anyone noticed that tn10 fell over twice - it uncovered a show stopper bug in Timelords that has to be fixed first. It’s related to the spawn/fork changes in node.”
Ecosystem news:
- A new Chia DEX called Dexxie launched this week. The Chia Plot wrote about it here.
- Goby.app is integrating with more projects (including Dexxie, above). Hashgreen mentioned that “Goby integration is apparently the most requested feature!” Great to see Web3 moving along for Chia.
- The team behind the Ecopunks token (to be redeemed for future Ecopunks NFTs) tweeted that they’d created a token to help Ukraine. We have not verified this, but here’s their tweet if you’re interested in checking it out.
- Project Ayven opened their discord and offered special titles to anyone who completed their virtual escape room. [more]
- Chia community member Gaerax posted on Reddit that they are working on a video game marketplace built on Chia. Here’s the concept and you can join the discussion on Reddit here. Very excited for this.
- Okra opened the sale for their tokens that will be redeemable for NFTs once Chia releases the NFT standard. [more]
- Hashgreen has been testing out their airdrop functionality with a few new coins. They also announced that they’re connecting to the TAIL Database’s API so that they can list ALL CATs (to be launched with a new UI for selecting trading pairs. They also gave a sneak peek of their AMM code and mentioned that the Chialisp team is
- Hashgreen mentioned that the Chialisp team is working on extensive chialisp references and docs, stating “the chialisp team is developing a chialisp library that enables secure smart coin development on Chia, much like OpenZeppelin on Ethereum. The goal is to not only establish a set of tools for easier smart coin development, but also re-implement some standards (e.g., CATs) for these advanced developers to understand the use case.” This is exciting!
Other relevant Chia news:
- You know it’s still early when an a16z Crypto GP posts that they’re a “decentralization maxi” while repping a .eth domain. LOL wut?
