Q2 2024 Chia Product Roadmap Update – What You Need to Know

The Chia Network team published a blog post summarizing the latest updates to the Chia Product roadmap with a focus on Chia Cloud Services Platform. What is this and what else do you need to know? Let’s dive in.

What has happened since the last roadmap update?

It had been 9 months since the last Chia product roadmap update in Q3 2023 and much of what was proposed was delivered. Notably, these items had the most visible impact:

warp.green Launches Ethereum Bridge
Expiring Offers being used for DEX liquidity
ASIC Timelords distributed and online

And we’ve also seen items be developed and released, but without a public facing use case that leverages them yet:

Singleton spend aggregation (renamed to Fast Forward)
sepc256k1 and sepc256r1 signatures
Vaults
DAO primitive
BLS Op codes

So it is no surprise that much of the latest roadmap update builds on these capabilities to turn them end-user applications.

To me, the general theme in this latest roadmap update is custody, custody, custody. Chia’s custody solutions built around vaults addresses a real problem faced by any user (retail or enterprise) of how to confidently hold their crypto assets securely with features such as clawbacks, watchtowers, and hardware signing — yet few blockchains have been able to provide an approachable solution to this.

Here are the highlights of the roadmap update, starting with Chia’s solution for bringing advanced custody with vaults to the masses, their Cloud Wallet, powered by Chia Cloud Services Platform.

Cloud Wallet (Q3-Q4 2024)

This is a web-based wallet running remotely in the cloud, with Chia Network Inc. hosting the backend. It is not as trustless as a full node wallet but offers a much better end user experience improvements similar to what some third party wallets offer (e.g. Goby, Ozone, etc.) without holding any keys itself. Note: this is not meant to replace any existing wallets and the reference wallet will have a simple single-key Vault supported as well.

The primary motivation for creating a Cloud Wallet is to provide the functions necessary for enterprises to manage and leverage advanced custody in Chia such as Vaults and recovery capabilities without having to sync their own full node. Although motivated by enterprise use cases, Chia Network will also be releasing a free tier and prosumer paid tier for normal users alongside the enterprise paid tier. Subscription prices for the paid tears have not been announced yet.

Moreover, this Software-as-a-Service offering serves as an additional revenue stream for Chia Network while enabling more enterprise customers that require more complex custody configurations and management.

Multitude of Signing Options (Q3 2024)

Since the Cloud Wallet does not hold any keys, each transaction will need to be signed and there are a multitude of options beyond BLS keys that will be supported:

Hardware wallets (e.g. Tangem)
Passkey (e.g. Yubikey or iCloud Passkey)
iOS Signer using on-device Secure Enclave

Passkeys will make browser-based wallets such as the Cloud Wallet easily accessible for onboarding new users. Mintgarden has a proof of concept of a Passkey wallet.

With alternative signature curves now available, it opens the door for other options too such as Android Signer App or Ledger hardware wallets that are now filed as “Under Consideration” on the roadmap.

Offer File Improvements (Q4 2024 – Q1 2025)

Later this year, the roadmap includes a few items aimed at improving the capabilities of Offer Files.

Marketplace Fees with Offers: This allows users to optionally include a fee to a marketplace to “boost” an offer. For example, you could pay a fee for your NFT offer to be highlighted on the front page of Mintgarden to draw more eyeballs.
Multiple Offers: This expands the Offers primitive to allow for greater flexibility in creating an offer. For example, if you don’t care which stablecoin you get, you could offer your NFT for 10 wUSDC or wUSDT or wUSDC.b, all done easily from the GUI.
Splash! Integration: Splash! is a P2P Offer File sharing network developed by dexie’s team and used by many marketplaces in the ecosystem. By integrating this into the reference wallet, you could simply share your Offer to Splash! and have it show up across the ecosystem. You can also view and accept Splash! offers directly from the GUI.
Partial Fill and Limit Orders: This expands the Offers primitive to allow for a range of prices and partial fills. For example, you could offer $1000 wUSDC for XCH at market rate with 1% slippage and have an experience that resembles a traditional order book while maintaining the P2P trustless nature of Offer Files.

DID 2.0 and Verifiable Credential Updates (Q4 2024)

DIDs and Verifiable Credentials are existing primitives. This roadmap update includes improvements on both to have them better work with vaults, recovery/rekey, and support more things like auto on-chain expiry and off-chain VC creation and import.

Such specific features indicate to me a requirement for an enterprise customer’s use case.

100% Block Utilization (Q4 2024)

With gradual optimization and having moved more of the core code to Rust, the team is comfortable relaxing the default block size limit to 100% at the end of the year without hampering performance on lower powered nodes.

This will put Chia’s layer 1 at it’s final throughput of ~40 TPS.