The last week has been a real big one for Chia Network and the Chia community. There wasn’t a ton of Chia news, but the news we got was prety big. Last week ended with Chia hosting another information-dense AMA and that’s where we will begin today, but that was certainly not the end of it.
I was a bit late in running down the AMA so I will include the news here. The biggest reveal from the AMA was the upcoming improvements to the full node, which is foreshadowing for later. We also got introduced to Jordan Schmidt, Chia’s new VP of Corporate Communications who I expect we will be seeing a lot of us in these things.
Next, on Monday, a World Bank presentation document started making its way around the community outlining the Climate Warehouse architecture and initial partners and timelines. This document, available in full here, is definitely worth the read for anyone investing time or money into the Chia ecosystem. It outlines the main national and subnational partners that will be launching the Climate Warehouse, and it indicates that the initial deployment should be happening as early as this month. To me this is the real big news that came out this week, as the national climate partnerships are what I think will propel Chia into the “big leagues”.
Next we took a quick look at SporkSwap. In that article I exchanged some Stai for some potentially useless SPORK CATs. It is an interesting service, but there was a counterpoint that I failed to discuss in the article I wanted to mention here. Some commentators, rightly, mentioned that you can always take them to Forks.green and exchange them for XCH. And while that is true, the 25 STAI I exchanged would have been like 2 dollars worth of XCH and I’m not unhappy with the transaction even after looking at it through that lens, but your mileage may vary.
Not strictly Chia news, but an old school l0pht hacker proved that a hardware wallet isn’t perfect protection, by retrieving $2 million dollars US from one. This is a really important lesson, and anyone concerned with wallet security should check it out. Great guest post by UKMayhem on a topic we should all be aware of in this space. Update your stuff!
Then we got Chia Blockchain 1.3 (beta). This is a big release, with a lot of new features and serious improvements. I did a brief review of the new software, and certainly missed some things. Major highlights: light wallet with encrypted keys and a new database format that shaves a solid 45% off the size of the database. I cannot recommend anyone use it for their main farming machine, but so far so good from my perspective.
The one big feature I missed in Chia 1.3 beta was that CATs do not automatically show up in your farming wallet. I have had a few “CAT people” reach out to me with concerns about this, but I actually think it is a mostly good thing. You will need to add the TAIL / Asset ID of any CATs you want showing up in your wallet, whether you have any or not. This will prevent random airdrops from showing up for everyone and getting instant traction, which might create a damper in the CAT Cambrian explosion going on (over 200 listed at taildatabase.com now). But this kind of opt-in wallet security will prevent a particular kind of attack that is affecting solidity based ecosystems right now. The issue is that a smart contract like an NFT or tokens to a malicious DeFi contract end up in your wallet without consent and interacting with them, even to transfer them away, causes you to lose funds. I am happy that Chia is giving the wallet owner control over what ends up there, and not some random token sender. Even if it harms the token sender, this is just basic spam protection.
And that concludes the week in Chia. It was a big one, but based on the timelines in the Climate Warehouse document I strongly suspect that the next few months will be equally busy. And that’s not to mention all the 3rd party services coming online, and the wave of NFT projects.
