Recently a developer of a new Chia fork, Cactus, reached out to me to take a look at their coin. This happens a lot right now, but I did want to use this new launching coin as an example of something I think is going to really affect the uptick of new forks.
Cactus is a direct fork from Chia 1.2.0, so it supports the NFT plots as well as the OG “pool key” plots. But what it doesn’t support, what none of them support yet from my understanding, is to farm to an NFT on the Chia blockchain. That’s what all our plots are signed to now, for a lot of us. And for new users coming online with Chia it is unlikely that they will plot any other way, as I find it hard to believe they will be thinking of forks when they start their journey.
Cactus seems fine. Better than some. They don’t seem to be doing anything nefarious from my brief look through their Github commits. Honestly, it looks like they have just done some simple find-and-replaces from Chia to Cactus and it is causing them issues with domains in the code, with “cactus-network.network.net” showing up in a number of places.
Honestly, they will probably fix this stuff over a few days. It will probably be fine. But I don’t see a lot of value in spending time on this. I hope it goes well for them, and its definitely better than some – I can tell that just by looking – but at the end of the day it feels like a bit of a dead end for serious Chia farmers right now. I cannot wait until one of them solves the NFT problem and open sources it.
They are having an “exchange launch” on the Chia Fork Traders discord next Wednesday (7/28) @ 4PM GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and if you wanted to take a look that was pretty fun when I took part in one.
