A new year and new Chia developers are on the scene. A team from MIT has partnered with some folks from Cornell and Taiwan to create a new, young development team working on Cha projects. They are calling themselves Hashgreen, which is an objectively good name for a Chia based development company, and their first project seems to be a real Decentralized Exchange (DeX).
This is not the team’s first project, as at least a few of the team members were the brains behind the very successful Mojodice. When I spoke to them last year they were some of the smartest people I have talked to since beginning this entire endeavor. They really understand the cryptography behind all this, and are (to my limited perspective) math whizzes. I think a DeX built by them will work exactly as intended.
It seems to me like this team has been funded by Jacket River Capital Partners who seem to be based pretty close to me, and also have Chia in their portfolio. So it is very interesting to me that Chia and Hashgreen share early investors. I suspect that this means that Hashgreen will have a short ramp to a Chia Cultivation Grant for their efforts.
They currently have their DeX running here where you can apparently use testnet offer files to execute trades. I have to say, this feels very unwieldly to me based on the interface and what I know about offer files. I see a lot of ways to exploit arbitrage when dealing with static priced offer files. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but absent reliance on HTTPS APIs, which carry their own risks, I’m not really sure how well this is going to work. I cannot wait to see though, and you can best believe as soon as I am able to I will be checking this system out.
All in all I am very happy that the developers I spoke to a few months ago have built up a bigger team and started work on something a lot of people have been asking for. Decentralized Exchanges make me very nervous right off the bat, so the idea that competent developers and mathematicians will be behind it brings me some degree of comfort. I think based on the bios of very, very smart talented people on their team they might not realize they have a pretty good brand for selling weed online too if Chia doesn’t work out.
