The Chia Network team published a blog post summarizing the latest updates to the Chia Product roadmap. Here’s a summary of the big items and what it could mean for every day users.
Expiring Offers
DNS from dexie explains the order book implications in this tweet. Moreover, expiring Offers means you don’t need to worry about remembering to manually cancel Offers. E.g. if you want to make a bid that is only good for 24 hours.
BLS Op Codes
Zero-knowledge rollups (ZK rollups) can now be built. This is one of several designs for L2 scaling and has distinct advantages over optimistic rollups or state channels. This doesn’t mean much in the short term but opens the door for future L2 scaling.
SECP256 Signatures
secp256r1 signatures: unlocks the use of Apple and Android’s hardware Secure Element chip so your phone can be used as a secure hardware wallet.
secp256k1 signatures: allows HSM/hardware wallets that already support Bitcoin to also support Chia without adding BLS support
ETH-XCH Bridge
This will be an excellent on-ramp to bring ETH and USDC (to start) into the Chia ecosystem as wrapped CATs. The bridge lets you unwrap back to Ethereum as well. I predict wrapped USDC will be the premier stablecoin on Chia. Let the capital flow in!
Vaults
This may be the new standard for custody! Clawbacks today are useful but optional. If someone has your keys they can send your assets without clawback.
But if your assets are in a vault, rules are enforced (clawback, rates, etc) on any asset leaving the vault.
DAO Primitive
Create, fund, vote, pay. Everything you’d want a DAO to do can be done securely on-chain with this base primitive for DAOs. Can be combined with other primitives like DIDs and VCs to finally allow DAOs for regulated use cases (e.g. securities trading).
Singleton Spend Aggregation
If you’ve ever received an error swapping on TibetSwap, very likely it’s because someone else was making a swap on that pair in that same block. This will allow multiple people to swap at the same time. This is important for DAO voting too.
ASIC Timelords
This won’t have an impact for users but suffice to say it greatly increases the security of the network by closing certain attack vectors that make it easier for a bad actor to carry out a 51% attack. Chia goes from super secure to super duper secure.
Other Updates
Other roadmap items around DataLayer, DIDs, and Verifiable Credentials are important developments for enterprises (and likely are prioritized for specific partnership use cases we’re not privy to yet) but they likely won’t impact the every day user of the blockchain.
Farming/plotting updates are interesting in light of the latest advances in plot “compression”. I’m sure Digital Spaceport will have a video breaking down the implications for farmers.
This was a huge roadmap update!
More questions? Check out the Q&A:
[…] Chia product roadmap had a number of exciting items in its last update in Q3 2023, many of which were delivered since then. Here are the top 10 things I’m predicting will […]