Last week the senior technical executives from Chia Network, Gene Hoffman, Bram Cohen and Paul Hainsworth, as well as J. Eckert moderating, hosted an Ask Me Anything about their product roadmap. This presentation was extremely information dense compared to Chia’s usual fare and there is a lot to talk about. I am going to break the AMA down into three or four parts this week in order to cover everything that was of interest to me. In part 1 I covered the Chia Asset Token (CAT) they announced they are working on with a “major customer” and in part 2 I looked into the advanced wallets they are building to support both the CATs and the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) components being covered today.
A big question that keeps coming up over and over again is how quickly Chia will have all the automated on-chain financial services that Ethereum has. Namely a robust DeFi community and decentralized application catalogue. This is an area I am definitely not an expert in, having never used a DeFi service or a smart contract other than the on-chain pool nfts. The big ones mentioned in the AMA were AMMs, Automated Market Makers and DEXs, Decentralized Exchanges.
This is going to be a big of a shorter post, because all I could really do is regurgitate the links I found, but I do know from paying attention for a few months that a real DeFI ecosystem is what sets Ethereum apart from other Proof of Work coins. Bram has said, here and other times, that one of the core design philosophies behind Chialisp and the CLVM is to enable robust DeFi protocols. The coin model they chose, and the way transactions resolve, is largely around not enabling exploits in DeFi systems from using the low price to buy and the high price to sell in the same transaction. I’m definitely not going to explain this right, so if the details behind the AMM and DeFi solutions coming up interest you, you should definitely check out the AMA and watch it carefully.
The other thing they talked about that is related here are partial transactions. Basically the capabilities will exist for someone to put a sell offer out on an asset on-chain and if someone wants to buy that asset they can simply complete the transaction and pay the price offered. This sounds like a way to broker NFT sales and the like without the type of shenanigans that was going on over at OpenSea last week, but I’m not certain.
All in all, this seems like the area of focus that will excite the community. Decentralized Finance is one of the promises made by cryptocurrencies and I personally can’t wait to see what happens. I think that with the Sirius Labs hackathon ending soon we will start to see a lot of Chialisp applications start to launch and my guess is a complete suite of DeFi protocols will be part of that.
