In the past six months, there have been a dozen CHIPs (Chia Improvement Proposals) submitted, with many of these coming from the community. I’ve put together a summary to better understand each one and their purpose.
What is a CHIP?
A CHIP (Chia Improvement Proposal) is a mechanism for the Chia community to establish consensus on new features or standards affecting Chia’s protocols and ecosystem. They are modelled after similar processes in other projects such as BIPs in Bitcoin and EIPs in Ethereum.
Anyone can submit a CHIP or participate in the discussion of existing ones. Many come from the Chia Network team related to internal projects and protocols they are developing. Others come from the community to influence the ecosystem to adopt a certain standard or practice. Not all CHIPs are accepted. Notably an early CHIP to introduce a configurable minimum transaction fee proposed by Bram was met with resistance from the community and ultimately withdrawn.
A summary of recent CHIPs
A list of existing CHIPs can be found on the main CHIP page. I also help maintain a CHIP Tracker on ChiaLinks that provides a table view as well as links to discussion and recordings of community calls on YouTube.
CHIP-0037 – EIP-712 Wallet Puzzle
The already approved CHIP-0036 enables the keccak256 hashing algorithm that is used in Ethereum. That CHIP was implemented by Rigidity and activates in a soft fork around March 22, 2025. This new operator enables popular hardware wallets (such as Ledger and Trezor) to sign Chia transactions using the EIP-712 Ethereum standard.
This CHIP proposes new Chialisp puzzles to enable such EIP-712 wallets. The idea was proposed by Yakuhito in this article A Path to Chia Hardware Wallet Support and he even made a proof-of-concept called Hermes available on GitHub.
CHIP-0038 – Revocable CATs
This CHIP proposes a new Revocable CAT standard and a revocation layer puzzle. This new standard introduces the ability for an issuing entity to take back custody of a revocable CAT token held in a wallet or a vault.
Such a feature is required for security and regulatory reasons associated with use cases such as asset-backed stablecoins (e.g., Circle USD, Tether USD) and securities (e.g. tokenized stock, Permuto certificates).
The revocation layer itself could also be used for other assets such as NFTs, though that use case isn’t covered in this CHIP.
CHIP-0039 – Fee Service Standard
When imagining a future where fee pressure is constant, new users onboarding to Chia may be faced with the issue of not having any XCH to pay for transaction fees in doing simple things like: requesting XCH from a faucet, creating a plot NFT, creating a vault, completing a bridge transaction. A Fee Service allows a third party to pay blockchain fees in such cases. One could imagine that such a service would accept payment through other means (e.g., fiat) to alleviate the user from needing to hold or worry about XCH, which could be a useful service for institutions looking to engage only with CATs.
CHIP-0040 – everything_with_singleton TAIL
This accompanies CHIP-0038 Revocable CATs and is a custom TAIL that allows proper minting and melting of CATs if signed by an issuing singleton such as a vault. This TAIL is another step towards supporting vaults as the primary way that users and institutions will manage assets on Chia.
CHIP-0041 – Streaming Puzzle
This one is very neat. There are many use cases that want to make numerous payments over time. For example, a subscription service that pays daily, distribution of rewards for continuously providing liquidity, earnings for hosting a DataLayer mirror, CAT airdrop for “staking” an NFT etc.
A naive implementation would make frequent micro payouts. In a fee pressure environment, this would be economically infeasible. Instead this CHIP proposes a way to create a streaming coin where the claimable portion by the receiver increases over time. This way, the owned amounts are guaranteed on-chain but freely accumulate until the receiver decides to claim it while the sender can clawback remaining portions at any time.
CHIP-0042 – Protected Single Sided Offers
It has long been possible to create an Offer file where one side is empty. Such a single sided offers is useful for invoicing, giveaways or sharing offers to onboard new users in the wild. However these offers are actually insecure and this CHIP aims to cleverly secure such offers. Protected single sided offers will be used at the Chia Toronto 2025 meet up.
CHIP-0043 – Meta Inner Puzzle Spec (MIPS)
This CHIP is a bit technical but basically it establishes a framework for developing and parsing new types of custody puzzles to bring consistency for developers and wallets with everything needed to spend the coin embedded in on-chain memos.
CHIP-0044 – Clawback Standard v2
Clawbacks were first introduced two years ago as an early form of advanced custody that Chia can offer and was especially helpful in preventing “fat finger” mistakes. One drawback of the initial implementation is that the receiver needed to take action to claim the coin after the clawback period to finalize the transaction. Unfortunately many users and exchanges didn’t have this support, rendering the feature not very useful.
This new iteration of clawbacks adds a few improvements, most notably:
- The sender cannot clawback the coin after the clawback period. This means the receiver does not need to be in a rush to claim a coin after the clawback period.
- Anyone can “push through” the coin to the receiver, not just the receiver themselves. This means even if the receiver’s wallet doesn’t support clawback coins, the sender can push it through so it arrives normally.
This CHIP makes clawbacks more universally useful without broader ecosystem adoption of the feature.
CHIP-0045 – Options Contracts
An early design for on-chain American style put and call options was tested in a proof-of-concept for XCH. This CHIP improves on that first design by using a custom singleton instead of the NFT1 standard, which was more tailored towards digital art and not financial instruments.
With Permuto securities expected to trade on-chain this year, having the ability to create and sell options contracts may lead to more efficient price discovery and markets.
CHIP-0046 – Detecting Dishonest NFT Offers
NFT royalties have been a passionate topic of discussion in recent weeks. It turned out that the community had various levels of understanding of what it meant for NFT royalties to be enforced on-chain. The revelation that many in the community had was that royalties are not guaranteed and could be trustlessly circumvented if both parties of an offer decided to act maliciously. This CHIP tries to get ahead of this possibility by explaining the mechanism and proposing a number of ideas on how to mitigate/discourage this type of behavior.
Community Call to Action
The CHIP process benefits from more voices and perspectives. Many CHIPs have had a lack of engagement from the community. One hope with this post is to stir some interest by explaining why each CHIP is important and to encourage more people to chime in by:
- Reviewing on-going CHIPs
- Participating in the GitHub discussion
- Participating on Chia discord #chips channel
- Participating in the community calls
- Proposing new CHIPs
There’s also a call for other community members to participate in the role of editor as well to manage and shepherd CHIPs through the process.
