In the third iteration of what is now becoming an annual tradition in Toronto, folks from the Chia community, including a delegation from Chia Network Inc., came together on July 23, 2026 for Chia Toronto 2026 to share their projects, ideas, and questions about Chia.
Coming off last year’s meetup with 90+ participants and given recent sentiment about Chia and the blockchain industry as a whole, I was anticipating a turn out more in line with the first Chia Toronto meetup several years ago. Coupled with feedback from last year’s event to have fewer talks and a quieter atmosphere, we ended up hosting the event at the private Steam Whistle Tap Room Mezzanine in Toronto’s historic John Street Roundhouse.
In the end, we had 22 attendees throughout the evening with 5 lightning talks, interesting technical discussions, and plenty of candid conversations. In particular, I was pleasantly surprised by, and appreciative of, the folks that travelled from across North America to attend as non-local travellers accounted for the majority of attendees.
The event itself was also bookended with a number of smaller gatherings. I was only able to attend a couple of these side events myself but I did appreciate the deeper and more focused discussions in smaller groups.
Memorabilia
Just like last year, CNI was kind enough to bring some swag to commemorate the meetup. This year, each attendee received a Chia Toronto 2026 scarf to go along with last year’s NFT-enabled caps.
Steve Stepp, community dev and This Week in Chia writer, handed out hardcopies of the inaugural print edition of This Week In Chia magazine. Volume 1 Issue 1 featured contributed articles:
- “Forward Progress” by Gene Hoffman
- “Programmable Coins” by Yakuhito (reposted here)
- “NOT.BOT” by Ken Griggs
- “Intro to Rue” by Brandon Haggstrom
- “XKV8: A Mineable CAT” by Tim Garrett
- “Unbundling History” by Slowest Timelord
- “Catalyst” by Tim Youngman
- “Soverign or Nothing” by Michael Taylor
- “Arcade 21” by Jeff Coleman
- “We’ve Been Waiting For Adoption In The Wrong Places” by Bullish0xCrypto
Lightning Talks
Although we had 8 attendees interested in giving a talk, in the end we only selected a handful to ensure there was a broad coverage of Chia topics while allowing enough time for food, drinks, and mingling.
Keynote: Gene Hoffman
The event kicked off with Gene sharing a “State of the Chain” and recapping the progress and development in the past year. He touched on the progress of Permuto AC/DCs, the upcoming proof of space hard fork, CNI’s funding situation through prefarm sales, as well as what CNI developers have been busy working on.
Unfortunately, there were technical difficulties with the recording for most of the talks so there won’t be a video available. However, you can look forward to a follow-up XCH.today interview with Gene to recap a bunch of these topics and more.
“Coffer: the Chia offer combinator” by Jude
Jude presented on his project, Coffer, a free Chia offer combinator that lets you merge multiple Chia offers into a single atomic transaction entirely client side. He laid out how such a tool could be coupled with a graph database of Offers to optimally route CAT-CAT swaps without risk of unexpected slippage between blocks. He also mentioned the potential role this has in creating liquid financial markets on-chain through arbitrage and in particular, to enable liquid stablecoin pairs.
“XCH.network and Farmers Market 2.0” by Slowest Timelord
In my own lightning talk, I shared a high level overview of the sites I run and shared details on the next iteration of Farmers Market that aims to revive interest and focus on Chia NFTs. The site is currently in closed beta and I’ll be sharing more as I incorporate suggestions and ideas that came out of conversations during the meetup.
“SpaceScan Intel” by Sabari
Sabari, who runs the popular Chia blockchain explorer SpaceScan, shared an overview of metrics and trends (including a curious spike in traffic in recent weeks). He also shared a number of things he’s working on including:
- A new version of SpaceScan built from the ground up
- SpaceScan Wallets for tracking wallets and generating tax reports by providing just a public key
- SpaceScan Intel for advanced analytics (think Glassnode for Chia)
- SpaceScan APIs for developers and builders to power their applications
“Rue Lang” by Rigidity
Rigidity shared an overview of Rue Lang, an alternative programming language to ChiaLisp (with a more familiar syntax and type safety) for writing Chia puzzles that compiles to CLVM. He shared the motivation behind the project, updates since last year, and what to expect in the future. An important thing to note is that Rue is already production-ready and in certain cases compiles to more optimized CLVM than ChiaLisp. In fact, the majority of new Chia puzzles this past year have been written in Rue rather than ChiaLisp.
“Chia Gaming Demo” by Bram
To wrap up the talks, Bram did a live demo of Chia Gaming, the same demo he shared with Bitcoin developers earlier in the week at the Bitcoin++ conference in Toronto. He took us through navigating a hub to find a gaming partner, setting up a state channel on-chain, playing through a series of reference games in real-time, and then closing/settling the channel. He also demonstrated how one side can unroll on-chain in the scenario where the other player is cheating or timed out.
I’m told the technical issues were fixed in time for this demo, so I expect the video to be posted at some point, which is good because a written summary just doesn’t do it justice.
Conclusion
It was good to see the Chia community show up, even though it was a fraction of last year’s attendance. The elephant in the room was the XCH price and delays in meaningful revenue streams for CNI so it wasn’t a surprise that it was a central topic of discussion that day. However it was also clear that attendees were also interested in ecosystem projects, learning about new chain developments, sharing their farming/mining experiences, and even live pair programming a new primitive.
Thank you to everyone that attended, and thank you CNI and Steve Stepp for the swag! All-in-all, it was an enjoyable event and I look forward to the next one!
