Chia Blog

Chia Offers Are Here

by Chia Team

Say hello to Offers, DEXes, and a Stablecoin!

We’re excited to launch Chia Offers today in Chia’s light wallet beta. It enables decentralized, peer-to-peer trading of assets on the Chia blockchain. It’s entirely self-custodied, requires no middleman or market maker, and eliminates counterparty risk. It doesn’t rely on a third-party smart contract either, as in Ethereum.

We designed Offers to be easy and usable. A Maker uses the Chia wallet to create an offer, for example offering 1 XCH for 100 USDS, a new USD-backed stablecoin on Chia (more on that exciting news further down!). The Maker can post the offer file anywhere, such as on Keybase, email, or Reddit for example. A Taker, who wants to take the other side of the trade, opens that file in the Chia wallet and accepts the offer, after which the trade is confirmed on-chain.

Starting today, you can use offers with several third party venues we have already integrated into the Light Wallet Beta. Hashgreen is a new decentralized exchange (DEX), also launching this week in Beta. It presents a conventional style order book comprised of offer files. Offerbin has similar functionality, in an easy to use stripped-down PasteBin style design. Other venues, such as Tsunami.network, are in development by our vibrant third party community, and are expected to launch in the near future. There’s also a Keybase group, called chia_offers, in which traders can make quotes and post offer files. We expect an ecosystem of user-friendly systems to emerge, enabling active traders to help facilitate liquidity within the chia ecosystem.

The launch this week of Stably’s USDS stablecoin makes Offers and USDS potentially the most affordable fiat-to-XCH onramp. Users can open a Stably Prime Trust account for free, fund it for free (or for the cost of a wire transfer), buy USDS at no fee, withdraw that USDS to a Chia wallet for $1 per withdrawal, and then make offers to trade USDS for XCH in the various ways mentioned above.

For developers, Chia views Offers as a base primitive—a building block on which the ecosystem can build interesting and novel things.

Some nifty things about offers:

  • The Maker doesn’t have to commit or lock up their funds to a third party
  • Makers can change their minds and cancel a transaction
  • They can free-range their offer, posting it in multiple places at once
  • Offers can include multiple assets in a single offer, such as offering XCH and USDS in exchange for Spacebucks and Marmotcoin

What’s next?

Offers shipping today are cool, but we’re only just getting started. What are some things you can expect to see with Offers in the future? Expect to see third party wallets supporting Offers before long. For example, a browser extension wallet, Metamask-style, (like Goby.app!) will greatly improve the user experience for trading with Offers support. It would natively integrate offers into a web based DEX, reducing Taker actions to clicking an offer in an order book, and accepting it instantly from the browser. Over time, more sophisticated uses of Offers will automate both Maker and Taker functionality, aggregate demand, and lead to greater price discovery and market depth. When NFTs launch on Chia, buyers will be able to bid and purchase using Offers, with zero counterparty risk and no middleman fees required. Offers can power on-chain auctions and Chia asset token (CAT) sales, for anything from carbon credits tracked in World Bank’s Climate Warehouse, to NFTs, utility token sales, or traditional finance assets like bonds, mortgage-backed securities, and more. You can even make an offer to have someone make a change in their database like the Climate Warehouse that only goes through when the database update is applied.

Check out Offers today by downloading the Chia light wallet beta, post some offers, and share your thoughts in our public Keybase.

Need help?

We also have tutorials to help you get started with offers, both using our light wallet GUI, and on the command line.