Chia News of the Week – Jan 16 to Feb 6

Well Chia Plot readers, its been a few weeks since I have done a news roundup, and that’s on me. It has been a busy run getting everything ready for the Space Marmots project and making sure that is being done correctly and well. But in that time there has been quite a bit of Chia News that I wanted to get to. Some of which I didn’t cover (or haven’t yet). I’m going to make a bit of a late New Year’s resolution here to not get so off track again, but because I have been off track this post will be a bit of a different format.

The main theme throughout the last few weeks has been making development and deployment on Chia easier and more accessible. First there was the decentralized cloud compute platform Akash offering cloud plotting as a service. After looking into this a bit, I couldn’t really find a good use for the service at the prices it looks to cost, but I haven’t been able to evaluate it myself, so who knows. But then came the announcement of Chia running a coding contest on Clovyr, and that made some people take a look at it – including me. Clovyr is, in contrast to cloud plotting, an extremely valuable service and allows for prospective developers to launch right into developing with Chialisp or against a Chia full node without having to run their own local infrastructure that takes days to get synced up. As someone who has built a few testnet10 nodes over the last few weeks I can promise you that this will make a difference to anyone trying out Chia development for the first time.

The next major theme over the past couple of weeks has been CATs, and specifically CATs you can (hopefully) trade for an NFT later on down the road when that works out. Freddie of Chia Explorer coined the term “CAT Cambrian Explosion“, and the term could not be more perfect. A lot of new varieties of token are popping up and most will be extinct by the next Chia epoch. And because Space Marmots started a trend of running a presale using CATs and Chia offer files there have been a plethora of NFT projects popping up promising the same thing. I find this incredibly risky, and while I bet most of these projects do deliver an NFT to their users I worry that some are just in it for the influx of XCH.

The big news over the last couple of weeks for Chia Network itself has been the somewhat rough time with the Stably USDS partnership, which has been costing them goodwill among their early adopters as Stably has seemingly been overwhelmed by the demand coupled with what seem to be problems with the light wallet. That however has been overshadowed by the release of the second version of their Business Whitepaper, which is quite good. They also hosted an AMA on Friday which I am in the process of writing up about, but a lot of in progress work was detailed there.

The main focus on Chia forks over the last while has been on what Chives has been up to, launching an in-house NFT marketplace for their blockchain ahead of Chia and integrated into the rest of their platform. This is in stark contrast to most of the rest of the Chia fork ecosystem, which is mostly swinging between stagnation and actively moving backwards.

The last news over the last few weeks has been the Space Marmots NFT project, which has been polarizing to the Chia community than anticipated, including for the readers here. The project has accomplished a ton of work and made a number of proof-of-concept advances towards delivering very high quality, high durability NFTs. The sellouts have been very quick, almost immediate and the Groundhog Day Marmot-based events were a blast. Ryan, the project leader, has really put his money where his mouth is when it comes to creating a fun ecosystem.