A few days ago I got a message from the developers of DogeChia, a Chia fork (or a Flax Fork according to Github) that suggested they have begun implementing code into their pre-release version that even Chia Network hasn’t publicly released to their network. This is really interesting and there is a lot to unpack here, so first let’s discuss what DogeChia is releasing.
As you can see the big 3 features here are Coloured Coin wallets, Rate Limited Wallets and Distributed Identity Wallets. These are really big deals, and will enable a lot of features for the coins that adopt them. Coloured Coins are very interesting, and I am planning a deep dive into them as they will be getting very relevant very soon. But in a nutshell they are a coin that contains some data representing a real world, or off-chain resource. Very similar to a traditional NFT except they can be manipulated and spent and changed. Rate Limited Wallets might mean different things to different people but in this context it is a wallet that cannot be simply emptied in a single transaction, but has limits set into the blockchain to determine how much can be transferred at once.
I actually don’t like the idea of rate limited wallets, as yes it becomes a last-ditch security measure once you have been compromised but I can see a situation where it harms a coin-holder as easily as helps them. There are definitely situations where they will be useful, large payment schemes, large pool wallets etc. But I suspect people will use them as cold wallets and won’t actually work to stop a compromised wallet from being emptied.,
The most interesting to me is the Distributed Identity Wallets. Right now this seems poorly defined, but what I imagine is a multi-signature wallet that will require multiple identities to initiate a transaction. This is really critical in the world of finance, where every large pool of money will require multiple signatures checked by a bank in order to access funds. This should be something similar, and will allow for large projects to use a single pool of XCH for funding. My guess is that, based on Bram saying so explicitly, that multi-sig wallets will be used to hold the pre-farm to ensure no single Chia Network employee can destroy the price and network by moving 21 million XCH.
I don’t think this means DogeChia is actually ahead of Chia Networks in development. They look to be just using unmerged code written by the Chia Network team. But it is exciting to see a Chia Fork project moving so quickly. As the proud owner of some DogeChia by way of a Chia Fork Traders auction I do plan on checking out these features in the next few days. What I am really looking to see though is a cross-chain mechanism for using the Chia Network plot NFTs for proper pooling, as opposed to the unique ideas being tried by forks today.
