Chia in China Year of the Dragon AMA with Bram Cohen and Gene Hoffman

As part of a Chinese New Year celebration on February 9, 2024, the Chia in China community run by @chiainchina organized an AMA with Chia Network Founder/CTO, Bram Cohen and CEO Gene Hoffman. They were joined by a number of notable developers in the community as well to share well wishes and a preview of what they’re working on, including Dexie, Tibetswap, Digital Spaceport, MonkeyZoo, Ozone Wallet, and more.

Here’s the full video. Key highlights and timestamps are mentioned below.

Highlights

Definitely watch the full video above, but here I’ll mention highlights and details from the AMA, some of which I have not heard before in previous news and interviews.

• [2:18] Chia Network is working an enterprise wallet, also known as “cloud wallet” for enterprise customers like Verra. It allows for a tokenization engine to be built in that allows m-of-n signing to issue CATs like carbon or debt. Later combined with Offer files this can create liquid markets and allow for easy audits. This will be open-source so a version can be built for non-enterprise users as well.
• [3:26] Chia Network is in talks with use cases with luxury goods manufacturers for authentication by creating a digital twin for products to provide provenance as well as proof of authenticity. Another use is to facilitate presales — buying an NFT of a watch or a bag and take delivery of it later.
• [4:25] Chia Network is in talks with banks so a bank can become an agent of last resort that can help users reclaim access to a vault. They’re also talking to smaller banks to replace some of the interbank payment networks.
• [9:39] In the long term, Chia Network is in the early stages of thinking about switching to a new plot format that reduces the effectiveness of plot compression. The purpose would be to push the ratio of needed computation to storage further towards storage. There will always be some amount of compression (as well as Hellman attack) that is possible but it would be slight. This would be a hard fork that would require broad community consensus to be adopted (Editor’s note: I’d imagine through a CHIP process).
• [15:50] Bram is in the middle of active Chialisp coding of state channels through an on-chain poker. He is working towards having a working and tested unit of code and can bring on other engineers within Chia Network to turn it into a usable product. On-chain games of skill (such as poker) are a massive market where a P2P implementation makes it legal in many places where centralized casinos cannot operate.
• [19:17] Chialisp-23 Chialisp-24 is a massive improvement for developers with many updates coming out of Bram’s experience with coding state channels and on-chain poker. Expected to be out by the end of the year.
  (2024/02/10 clarification: “cl-23 is already out which already has a lot of features. What’s going to be out by the end of this year is cl-24 which will have a much more all-around complete feature set and better developer tools. In general the sigil of Chialisp refers to the year it was made, the plan being that there will be small incremental versions of cl-24 throughout the year with different sigils and a simplified sigil at the end of the year for the whole wrap-up”)
• [25:08] The delay with the ETH bridge was due to feedback from validators where they did not like the initial architecture, specifically they did not want to custody any funds. yakuh1t0 prototyped a version of the ETH bridge that addresses that concern.
• [26:31] Of the 300,000 XCH sent to the market maker from the prefarm, about 1/3rd of that is a loan to provide liquidity, the other 2/3rds is marked for sale on behalf of CNI.
  Editor’s note: Read about the first, second, third round of transfers to the market maker.
• [31:21] The implementation of ordinals, and later inscriptions, in Bitcoin could have been inspired by a conversation between Bram and Casey Rodamor at a Bitcoin devs meeting where Bram explained how Chia Asset Tokens worked.

Launch Announcement for CHIAXGRANT

During this AMA, the Chia in China community announced the launch of CHIAXGRANT, a community funded grant program to promote development of the Chia ecosystem. They intend distribute 100 XCH per month in grants to various projects. Follow them on X to learn more!

Thank you Chia in China for organizing and hosting this event, and to Bernard for the real-time translations!