Because of how slowly some of the projects we have all gotten excited about, as a Chia community, have taken to launch I have held this one close to my chest. But hot on the heels of the rest of the DeFi based announcements that have been coming xch.gallery has finally released their public roadmap for their Chia NFT marketplace and given us something to talk about.
While they have been developing their platform in the open, on Chia Network’s testnet10, they haven’t been generating a ton of hype, clearly preferring to start that engine up once the Chia NFT standard is complete (maybe Wednesday?) and they have a working product.
Last night on Twitter they released their first roadmap of what the Chia Community can expect. They are right now in full swing of their beta test, right on schedule, and plan on launching to Mainnet in Q2 of this year. What is interesting is that they are planning on support for other Proof of Space and Time blockchains, maybe some Chia Forks and maybe Mad Max’s MMX.
It looks like the XCH Gallery team is fully serious about being the forefront NFT marketplace. We haven’t heard a lot from Arbor place in the last little while, with the team hard at work on improving Arbor Wallet. But I suspect the NFT marketplace sector is going to heat up big in 2022 with competition in the Chia ecosystem.
I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to discuss the controversy around NFTs. My position stays the same on them. I do not understand why someone would want one, but they are a collectible and there is an infinite spectrum of collectibles people love that I don’t understand. And a lot of collectibles are bubbles based entirely on speculative interest, so I don’t really think NFTs are some sort of special evil that some folks do. I do understand the climate-impact argument behind a lot of the criticism of the sector, which is why I think that NFT ownership will ultimately gravitate away from expensive Proof of Work blockchains to greener Proof of Space, or Proof of Stake chains.
