What have the Chia Forks been up to?

Since the release of the light wallet and Chia Asset Tokens (CATs) there has been a general loss of focus on the Chia forks ecosystem. Most of the general activity has been around the CAT Cambrian explosion and all the different varieties becoming available. But, for better or for worse, the Chia Forks are hard at work and haven’t stopped. At least a few of them.

Lets start with the good. HDDCoin and Chives have been killing it, with new feature launches and a flurry of development. HDDCoin has successfully launched its store, and HODL program is live. They are trading on a real exchange and their community is active. Chives has been building tool after tool, for both the Chia blockchain and their own. They have just launched their NFT marketplace (more details coming) for Chives Pets and have a game coming. They also built the tool being used all over right now to issue Chia Asset Tokens. Chives is actually very interesting as they are developing solutions for both their blockchain and the Chia blockchain, with most of the development going to their home turf.

Those two projects are fascinating to me, as I think they have transcended the Chia fork ecosystem and are just a pair of altcoins, like Chia itself. They are traded on exchanges that have little to do with Chia and are making very real development milestones regularly. This is similar to Stai, who I will get to in a second and in contrast to Flax, who I still love but has been strangely quiet recently. HDDCoin and Chives are two of the real gems from the Chia fork explosion from last summer and I think they are putting themselves into good position for the next bull market when people start getting excited about altcoins again.

Now to Stai. I was formerly quite bullish on Stai, thinking that their marriage of real world applicability and a Chia fork could create an interesting opportunity. And I still do, although after the CAT mayhem we have been seeing its likely that they would be better served with an Asset token than a full blockchain. But they seem to have become obsessed with the price of their coin and are heading down the path of Silicoin. This is extremely disappointing to me, as I am a big fan of the team and I see the death of their project if they continue in this direction. According to their discord they plan on integrating staking (STAIking, ugh) into their consensus method in order to incentivize their farmers to hold and not sell their coins. Similar to HDDCoin’s HODL program in concept, in practice its going to be messy. Where HDDCoin launched a set of smart contracts and a web service Stai will be making much more drastic changes. They are going to need to launch a new chain and are apparently planning to airdrop wallet values between the two chains. I think this plan is fraught with issues and will end up consuming their project. We shall see if they pull it off better than Silicoin.

As for Flax, no terrible decisions here. Just quiet on that front. Last we heard Flaxseed was working on a pooling protocol that would allow for NFT and OG plots originally plotted for Chia to be used in Flax-specific pools. I do not know what progress has been made there, but I do expect good things. I think the problem is a hard one, and with the number of new updates brought out by Chia over the last few months (CATs, offers, the light wallet itself) meaning keeping up is probably a full time job in itself – especially with Flaxseed’s habit of improving on everything they release.

As for the rest of the forks, I do not have high hopes. Some of them have interesting use cases, AedgeCoin wants to build an algorithmic trading platform, or good developers like Flora. But with the ease of use for issuing and trading CATs now it is very heavy and expensive to run a full Chia fork for very little return at this point. And that’s not even the end of it, as Chia Layer 2 networks will start coming this year almost for certain and that will be another turning point for our beloved forks.