Whenever I talk about Chia forks there is always one team that is consistently releasing new services for their blockchain users. Well, two. But the one specifically I am referring to here is Chives. Chives coin is a Chia fork that disallows co-farming, meaning that you need to bring your own plots specifically for Chives (like MMX). This is to keep a few Chia whales from dominating the blockchain and give them their own community. And it has worked.
For the last few days I have been playing around with the set of tools available at chivescoin.net, and its actually the most complete set of Proof of Space and Time tools available anywhere on the internet. They have a functional exchange, an NFT marketplace that works, their CAT creator that lets you deploy tokens on either the Chia or Chives blockchains. It’s pretty cool. They also have launched xchtoken.org, which is the only explorer I’m aware of tracking CATs, and I have used it extensively. (edit: I have been corrected and SpaceScan.io also does this now. Thanks Jon!)
To do the testing I wanted to do I created a couple of wallets on their system, which allows you to interact with the paid services. I think proceeded to use their Chives Swap exchange to purchase some XCC. That worked well, and I’m pretty sure I got the best price available. I think used that XCC to buy an NFT from their NFT marketplace.
Here I want to make an aside about the Chives NFT marketplace. Technically, it seems to work fine. I haven’t dug under the hood yet to see exactly what I bought in terms of singleton and puzzles, but it seems to be exactly what I was expecting. Very similar to an NFT purchasing experience on other marketplaces, except you need to use the Chivescoin.net built in wallet rather than a browser extension you run yourself. This is a pretty good experience. But the content there is fairly lackluster so far. This is an adoption problem and I’m sure OpenSea and Rarible launched with crap. This presents an opportunity for anyone with decent art to sell, as I had to look for something worth buying. Since my wife was there, we ended up going with the dog who had recently passed because the thought made her sad.
I think to a lot of people this is the more typical L1 crypto experience, with a self contained ecosystem developed by the team with enough to get by. And they have done it in a very short amount of time. I haven’t any issues using their software and it has been a pretty positive experience. However, its not a very decentralized experience right now. I know they are partnering with people around the ecosystem and would love to have this accessed through a 3rd party wallet, as well as other integrations. But as of right now a huge amount of the services are controlled by the Chives team itself. And its not perfect. What works from a UI perspective for the Exchange component, like the Single Page App aspect creates some annoyances when trying to share a link to a specific NFT. So I think there is still room to improve.
The crawl through the Chives ecosystem was illumining and pretty good. Their NFT marketplace looks ready to go. They probably need to do deal with an easy way to onramp fiat so the muggles can buy their NFTs. The experience wasn’t perfect, with a couple rough edges, but better than a lot of crypto web experiences I have had. All in all, I am a huge fan of how Chives has built out their ecosystem and am looking forward to see how that grows.
