Chia News of the Week – Jan 9 to Jan 16

Well its definitely been a new year, with a lot of new energy coming to the Chia ecosystem – both from Chia Network and from the Chia community. A lot happened in the world of Chia News that more than makes up for the slow period over the Christmas break.

The very first thing we wrote about in this period was the upcoming Chia NFT gallery xch.gallery. Right now they have a fully working NFT minting and sale system running on Testnet10. It is quite something, not just a promise but a product. This has been in the works for a while, and the team over there at xch.gallery has been had their components running on testnet for a bit. But this week they released their public roadmap and that tells us the plan for next 6 months or so. Get ready for Chia NFT season Q2 2022 by the looks of it.

HDDCoin’s HODL smart contract savings program went live Monday as well, with 3 available contracts. During beta I had looked at the program and found it to be very well done, with a team that was serious about testing it and remediating any security issues before it launched. This kind of stuff is a bit beyond me, tokenomics and all, but I locked up some HDD in the program. Why not, right?

And in not so sunny news, Arbor Wallet was having serious issues at the start of last week with users reporting that they were unable to send transactions. There were some node issues that DFI needed to fix, but then at the same time because of what looked like issues arising from the change of ownership last year the Arbor wallet mobile app was removed from iOS and the Google Play store. As of now they are not back.

Also Monday Chia began sending out the CH21 Chia Holiday 2021 tokens that they promised right before Christmas. It took a little bit of time, as I have learned about sending out many transactions at a time, but they did all (mostly) arrive already. I got mine at least. Chia is doing one-offs of anyone they provably missed before the melt the rest of the coins down, so if you think you should have gotten one but didn’t its still worth looking into.

Then last week came the real surge of DeFi on the Chia blockchain. We had so much DeFi news, as well as related services. So of course I made my first Chia Asset Token using the Chivescoin.net tools. They are very easy to use and have resulted in what Freddie calls “The CAT Cambrian explosion” which is a VERY good description, especially considering how many of these I expect to go extinct.

One of the DeX’s we talked about last week announced this week that they had received a Chia Cultivation Grant. This is excellent news as the Hashgreen team that received that is fantastic, and I am glad to see them funded. That Mojodice money can only go so far. And then the next day we found out why when Chia made their the big announcement they had been teasing.

Chia Network announced Offer Files and truly decentralized trades. This is quite a big deal and is unlike DeFi in other blockchain ecosystems. Along with the announcement came the announcement of yet another DeFi marketplace, and one I have been using – OfferBin.io. Then came the first Chia stablecoin – Stably’s USDS. They also released a new version of the Chia Light Wallet with support for offer files and automated offer submission to Hashgreen and Offerbin. The new Light Wallet is much improved from the previous version according to the testing I have been doing since release, so that was a pretty big set of announcements.

Now that all those pieces were in place: easy CAT creation, decentralized markets and a stablecoin one of the most exciting projects to come out of the Chia ecosystem to data launched – 1mojo.trade. This blog by Freddie is the crypto equivalent of the Red Paper Clip trade and I am totally addicted to this site. He has so far been wildly successful and I have no doubt he will be pretty wealthy from these efforts sooner than we think.

That’s it, although with all the rapid developments happening in the Chia over the past week the rails for even more projects are starting to come together. It was inevitable that in Chia Marmot NFTs would be a thing. Nay, THE thing. And that is looking true with multiple Marmot projects starting to come to fruition, including one from our very own Ryan – Space Marmots. Little is known about Space Marmots, or the other projects starting to bubble up, but what is known is that it is likely to take the ecosystem by storm, just as CATs have.