With all the focus right now on the Chia forks drawing the ire of Chia Network, specifically the ChiaDogeCoin situation and presumably DogeChia, ChiaRose and ChiaLite, I thought I would take a look at another small fork called Melati, or Jasmine, that has not gotten much attention yet. Hendrik from The Chia Plot discord thought it might be interesting, and he was not wrong.
Melati Network is a direct fork of Chia Blockchain (so far) and is more focused on the pre-farm of 21 million XCH than the technology itself. They have put in a lot of work to their project so far, with the website and whitepaper as complete as I could expect. They have concrete goals to facilitate a marketplace with XMX (they call it Jasmine) and to start small as a payment network and grow. And, very importantly to some, only a 300,000 XMX pre-farm.
Unlike many of the other projects we have covered here the Melati Network team is very open about their identities, including their education history and a little blurb about each of their 3 team members on their about page. If you have been reading this site you will know that I am a big fan of project owners being open about their identities. I see the benefits of anonymity in some situations, but trying to establish long term trust is not one of them.
I don’t necessarily agree with the issue of the pre-farm, but I do understand the concern. In their business whitepaper they talk about their plans for an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) out of their prefarm and that they plan to totally fund the project from their own Jasmine the developers farm.
They seem to have already tried to get listed on a DeFi exchange called Vindax, which the developer I spoke to, Syah Putra, says was a mistake. He said it made them look greedy, which was not their intent it just seemed easy to do and would provide value to the community.
The team is very polite and helpful in their discord, a very far cry from most open source projects I have seen, and very happy to help their users with problems. It reminds me a little of the Chia keybase.
The big question, however, is still going to remain a question. I asked their developer if they have any plans to support plots tied to NFTs on the Chia blockchain and he says they currently do not, not fully. They support NFT plots to farm without getting the 1.75 XMX portion of the pool reward, but not completely. This is a big deal, and I don’t think any direct Chia clone will have a hope of significant growth without the ability to fully support the plots being made today.
Melati runs on port 2444 and like a lot of other clones is having introducer issues and you need to manually kick it a little to get it syncing. According to their discord they have also had issues while rebooting their timelord. Having only a single Timelord is a gigantic risk for a PoST blockchain and this is something I hope they resolve soon.
All in all I do wish them the best of luck, they seem a lot more earnest about doing something long term than just playing around or creating a quick pump and dump situation. But what they are doing is difficult, and there are a lot of challenges they face. They do not seem to be using any Chia trademarks in their marketing materials, but they also don’t have a solution to the looming problem facing all the chia forks: the NFT plots.
