News and insights

The Chia Blog

News, releases, and insights straight from the team.

Blog posts, page 7

  1. 7 min read

    • Market Insights

    Cypherpunks in Sportcoats: Tech is Eating Your Fin

    Those applying traditional financial industry modes of interpretation around market sizes and incumbency are doomed to fail at predicting which blockchain technologies will get mass adoption. Let’s discuss why.

    Marc Andressen famously coined the phrase, “software is eating the world.” Now software has turned its attention to the rails of the global financial infrastructure. The reasons are obvious…

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  2. 4 min read

    • Build
    • Products and Capabilities

    Divided We Fork

    Chia version 1.3 (coming Soon®) will have many new features and some significant upgrades. One change we’ve talked about a bit less is the upcoming soft fork to disallow negative division. This post will cover what you need to know about this change.

    Blockchains have two basic methods of changing their consensus: hard fork and soft fork. Fundamentally, a hard fork is a broadening of the rules, and…

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  3. 5 min read

    • Build

    The Clovyr Developer Challenge Results!

    Over the course of February 3rd and 4th, we held a Developer Challenge in partnership with our friends at Clovyr (opens in a new tab). Focusing on the amazing chialisp development environment provided by Clovyr, we wanted to see what kind of smart-coin focused project intrepid developers could create over a 24 hour window.

    With 74 participants signed up, the event kicked off at 12 noon sharp, PST, on Thursday the 3rd…

    Read more of The Clovyr Developer Challenge Results!
  4. 10 min read

    • Blockchain

    Zoned storage - Using SMR Drives for Chia Farming?

    Special thanks to Western Digital for sending me the drives to test and being available to answer many of my technical questions!

    The Chia farmer community has figured out that high-capacity HDDs deliver the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for Chia farming. SMR, or shingled magnetic recording, is a technology that allows for storing more data in the same physical disk. SMR uses the fact that…

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  5. 4 min read

    • Build

    CHia Improvement Proposals

    A flow chart for CHIPs not to be confused with CHiPS (opens in a new tab)

    Have you ever read through Chia’s source code or protocols and thought, I have an idea to improve that? Well, now’s your chance! A CHia Improvement Proposal (opens in a new tab) (CHIP) is a formal document for improving Chia’s protocols, procedures, tooling, design decisions, or really anything related to Chia. CHIPs come in all sizes, from small (such as semantic…

    Read more of CHia Improvement Proposals
  6. 5 min read

    • Build
    • Products and Capabilities

    1.3 Beta Release

    We at Chia have been working hard to bring many of our new features together into one easy-to-use release. Today, we’re proud to announce the beta release of our 1.3 client. Because this release is still in beta, we recommend that you only install it on non mission-critical systems. If you are running a large farm, you should wait for the full 1.3 release before upgrading. This is coming… Soon™

    Tha…

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  7. 2 min read

    • Build

    The Chia Developer Forums Launch

    The Chia Developers forum has been sunsetted. For support and discussions, visit our Discord Server (opens in a new tab).

    We are excited to share with you the launch of our new Developer Community forums at developers.chia.net (opens in a new tab)! In a previous blog post, we discussed our ongoing plans to overhaul our community developer documentation in a variety of ways… and this is the next step of that process.

    While docs.chia.net (opens in a new tab) and…

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  8. 1 min read

    • Company Updates

    Version 2.0 of the Chia Business Whitepaper

    Today we release version 2.0 of the Chia Business Whitepaper. Much has changed since the first versions of this document including Chia becoming the largest and most decentralized blockchain by node count ever and being secured by 40+ EB of space. While we were at it we delivered our significant new decentralized pooling functionality and actual decentralized DeFi - just to name a few.

    We’re also…

    Read more of Version 2.0 of the Chia Business Whitepaper
  9. 4 min read

    • Build

    Learn Chialisp with Clovyr and Compete in our Upcoming Developer Challenge

    Update below with dates and registration.

    Since the launch of mainnet last year, we at Chia have been working hard to increase the adoption of the Chia blockchain. We’ve focused our energy on building reference implementations like the Pool Reference (opens in a new tab), Chialisp standards such as CAT1, and support for DEXes with Offers. In these efforts, the Chia team has led the development charge, but it has always…

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  10. 4 min read

    • Blockchain
    • Build
    • Products and Capabilities

    Chia Offers Are Here

    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…

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  11. 5 min read

    • Products and Capabilities

    Understanding the Changes in the New Light Wallet

    In the coming weeks, we’ll be making some major updates to the official Chia client with v1.3. One of the biggest will be bringing the light wallet out of Beta and including it and its observer addresses into the core software package. The light wallet will, on average, improve your wallet sync times from many hours to mere minutes. You’ll also be able to run a wallet without running a node…

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  12. 7 min read

    • Company Updates

    Happy Holidays from Chia!

    With over 16 seasonal holidays in the second half of December observed around the world, we here at Chia Network feel a desire to celebrate the holidays with everyone in the community as we bring 2021 to a close. We would like to do so in a way that enables us to thank everyone for their support in farming Chia since the launch of Mainnet this year by way of “surprise and delight.”

    In recognition…

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  13. 3 min read

    • Build

    Announcing the launch of docs.chia.net!

    We have a new home for Documentation for all things Chia launching today, at https://docs.chia.net (opens in a new tab)!

    Today we’re excited to announce the launch of our new Chia Docs site (opens in a new tab)! This new site is step one of several in our ongoing efforts to help streamline and clarify our repositories for end-user support, as well as for developer documentation.

    We’ve not been blind to the fact that we have a fair bit of…

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  14. 12 min read

    • Blockchain

    How Do Hard Drives Fail?

    HDDs (hard disk drives) have moving parts and are subject to failure from mechanical wear and tear through regular use, and external environmental factors like temperature. Use SMART to monitor the drive’s health to look for uncorrectable errors and reallocated sectors for indications of predictive failure.

    When new interns came into our group at Intel over the years, I would grab a whiteboard and…

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  15. 5 min read

    • Products and Capabilities

    The CAT's Out Of The Bag: Chia Releases the CAT1 Standard

    A selection of Chia employees’ cats (not to be confused with CATs)

    We’re excited to announce the release of the CAT1 Standard (opens in a new tab). This marks the addition of a powerful set of new features to Chia’s ecosystem. We can’t wait to see the creative breeds of CATs our community comes up with!

    Chia Asset Tokens are fungible tokens that are minted from XCH and live on Chia’s blockchain. CATs have the property…

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  16. 2 min read

    • Build
    • Company Updates
    • Security

    Chia's Bug Bounty Program Has Launched with Bugcrowd

    We are excited to announce that today our new Bug Bounty program has gone live with the support of Bugcrowd (opens in a new tab)!

    This program is initially rolling out to a curated list of select security researchers managed by Bugcrowd while we iron out any kinks and get the program up to full speed. After that, Bugcrowd will be inviting more researchers to the program in waves over the next few weeks, with the goal…

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  17. 2 min read

    • Company Updates

    Chia Joins the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance

    Bram and I are no real fans of the current patent regime around software for a host of reasons. We, however, are realists about needing patent protection to defend ours and other developers’ ability to innovate and use new blockchain related technologies to solve real world problems.

    That is why today we are announcing that we have joined the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (opens in a new tab). We are pooling our…

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  18. 5 min read

    • Products and Capabilities

    Chia Releases Public AWS Image for Bluebox Timelords

    We have released a publicly accessible AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for Amazon Web Services. AWS makes it very fast and easy to deploy a Bluebox Timelord to an EC2 instance that you can control and manage in your own AWS environment. Once the image has been deployed, no additional work will be required by the user to get the Bluebox Timelord online. After boot, both a Full Node and Timelord will…

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  19. 8 min read

    • Company Updates

    30 hours to 30 minutes, Chia’s Release Automation Story

    On March 17th, 2021, the roughly 15 chia engineers responsible for launching mainnet had just finished the “go, no go” checklist for launching Chia version 1.0.0. For the past several weeks the entire Chia team had been on high alert, working long hours, ironing out the final details that would allow the blockchain to finally launch from testnet to mainnet. It was an exciting and hectic time for…

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  20. 3 min read

    • Blockchain
    • Products and Capabilities

    Chia Token Standard Naming

    We’re in the process of making a real standard for tokens which will guarantee interoperability for developers who follow it, and it needs a name. In the past we’ve used the term ‘coloured coins’ in our documentation and code to refer to tokens built on top of Chia. This has the disadvantage that it’s an esoteric bit of jargon, refers to a general concept rather than our specific implementation…

    Read more of Chia Token Standard Naming
  21. 4 min read

    • Build
    • Products and Capabilities

    Important Version 1.2.6 Information

    We’ve released version 1.2.6 (opens in a new tab), which is to address a bug-fix with nodes. While this is technically a bug-fix version, we want to stress the importance of this update being applied to your own nodes, and encourage you to update to it at the earliest convenience.

    Last week a bug was detected in the nodes that caused them to consume excessive amounts of memory when the queue of incoming…

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  22. 7 min read

    • Company Updates

    Chia Joins the Open Compute Project

    Chia is excited to announce that we are joining the Open Compute Project (opens in a new tab) to contribute to sustainability in storage.

    OCP is mainly known for open, modular, and vanity-free hardware that runs hyperscale data centers like Facebook and Microsoft, but OCP 2.0 (opens in a new tab) is laying out a new strategy to meet sustainability and circularity goals while ensuring it seeds future innovative technologies like open…

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  23. 5 min read

    • Company Updates

    Chia Cultivation Grant Program

    TL;DR Chia is launching the Chia Cultivation Grant to invest in independent developers who are looking to create new and exciting tools to benefit the Chia ecosystem at large.

    Chia Networks is excited to announce the Chia Cultivation Grant program. As we are committed to growing and nurturing the Chia ecosystem, we realize that we can’t (and shouldn’t) do everything ourselves. Not only are we…

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  24. 10 min read

    • Blockchain

    Chia and SSD Endurance - Big Progress, Less Waste

    Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about Chia and SSD endurance. The Chia proof of space construction requires a lot of sorting on temporary storage space to make the plot format secure and efficient for quick verification later in farming. The Chia plotting workload is only required to be performed once per plot during the initial creation, where the final plot file lives on a low power…

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