A few months ago I wrote a piece about Chia and how important it was for them to choose partners in the future after the mess with Sirius. That was a warning about the risk of partnering with new, unproven or smaller companies like Stably and how they would inevitably end up spending their own good will to improve their partners position rather than leveraging a partner’s good will to improve their own.
This is very obvious with the boost in credibility the project has gotten from the partnerships with the World Bank Climate Warehouse project and the country of Costa Rica. These are large institutions and a partnership with Chia is a risk for them and a benefit to Chia Network. Had Chia continued along this path it would have been very good for the early supports of the project, like those that read this blog.
Then came the announcement of offer files and the onboarding of Stably into the ecosystem as the first US Dollar backed stablecoin on the Chia blockchain network. This was ostensibly good news, and I argue still is, as it gave a real mechanism to onboard and offboard with XCH and a portal to move XCH into other networks through USDS. This is a very good thing, on paper.
But when it launched some issues started cropping up right away. First, they didn’t support XLM memos so people trying to move funds through XLM in immediately had issues. When people looked into them, it seemed the volume was very thin considering the demand that was pent up for stablecoins in the Chia ecosystem. And then came the deposit issues.
This is the biggest problem, and has been legitimately costing Chia some goodwill among their userbase. If you check the #general channel of their Chia_offers keybase team it is littered with people seeking support for Stably transactions. Lots of people have reported delays in transfers in both directions and my gut feeling this is due to the low volume of USDS available in general, as well as the small team.
They even took Chia off their menu entirely for a few days due to wallet issues. Now, I hope beyond hope that Chia did not have Stably launch with the Beta light wallet for CAT management and that they have a stable node built-to-purpose. But if not, this could be the root of some of their issues.
To be clear I don’t think there is anything wrong with Stably in general. From what I can tell they are an honest outfit trying to build a legitimate stablecoin solution and avoid the issues Tether had in its early days. In order to do that they cannot just print USDS out of thin air and just promise themselves that they will balance the books later. It means operational issues while they keep the books balanced the whole time, and that’s what we are seeing. So the issues are potentially excusable from a macro sense.
But these are real people having real issues with real money, and because these are Chia People going to Stably on Chia’s recommendation Chia Network is going to eat some of the bad mojo. I sincerely hope that Stably sorts this out and wins these customers back, because this is a pretty critical moment for Chia and its not going great for everyone.
That screenshot is me! :). Thankfully Stably fixed the problem and my $1,600 USDS was processed.
Any recent updates to the WBCW and CR projects?
Thank you for trying out our platform and giving detailed and fair feedback!
My name is David and I’m the CTO at Stably, I’d love to shed some light on some of the issues you mentioned and our users have experienced.
Memo for Stellar transactions: I assume you are talking about XLM withdrawals, unfortunately due to Stably not holding the actual XLM funds we rely on our crypto custodian partner to process these and they do not accept memos when doing XLM withdrawals and so we cannot pass this feature on to our users. We plan to do our own custody for XLM in the future and will support memos when that time comes. For now we recommend that users withdraw XLM to a non-custodial wallet and then do the corresponding transfer to exchanges or wherever requires the memo.
Chia USDS deposit and withdrawal times: You are spot on that we are using the beta light wallet for CAT management. It was the only open source solution available at the time, and we were not aware of some of the shortcomings when we first scoped the integration. In the interest of getting something out for the community in a timely manner we have written some custom endpoints and released with it for the time being, but we do have long term plans to work directly with the Chia foundation on releasing an open source golang SDK for managing CAT transactions in a more stateless manner. Since it looks like you use the wallet for business purposes as well we’d love to have you as a collaborator in this project.
These are just a few of the things we are working on improving internally, and we are committed to bringing a better fiat on-ramping experience to the Chia ecosystem for the long run. That said, our technical team is still quite small at the moment but we are trying to grow quickly this year. If you (the reader) or anyone you know feels passionately about connecting traditional finance with DeFi through software please reach out to us at [email protected] or find our latest openings on our website.
Thank you Chris for taking the time to write about your experience and thank you reader for reading!