Is the first Chia soft fork imminent?

We talk a lot about Chia Forks around these parts, co-farming compatible plots is one of the selling points of Chia Network’s technology stack. But we might be looking at a different sort of fork coming up soon, one that participants of other blockchains might be more familiar with. The first Chia soft fork might be just around the corner.

According to a post in the #chialisp channel in the official Chia Keybase there is an issue with the current version of the CLVM. The issue involves dividing a negative number which will sometimes fail to round off correctly and thus occasionally give the wrong result. This is probably not as big a deal as it sounds, as the functionality is edge case, but a problem is a problem and here we have one.

From the sounds of it they are leaning towards a soft fork to prevent the issue from cropping up into production, but are soliciting feedback from the Chia developer community in order to determine if the functionality is used and how to go about making the change.

If you are a Chialisp developer, please familiarize yourself with the issue in the #chialisp channel on Keybase. It appears from the communications that I can understand that the divmod function works just fine, it is just the basic div that creates the issue. Since dividing negative numbers isn’t a normal operation its possible that no one is using div this way in production code, but if you are writing a chialisp application right now then you should make sure to switch any divs to divmods.

Seeing Chia launch a soft fork will be an interesting exercise to see how much of the farming population is paying attention. This will be well communicated, including on this site, but no matter how well you communicate something like this some folks will invariably fall behind. I hope its not too many people, and you should make sure you aren’t among them lest you lose the ability to collect farming rewards.