Security

Chia is one of the most decentralized blockchains by node count, with more than 100,000 global nodes, and we constructed our smart contracting language, based on Lisp, with security as the highest priority. Corporations, financial institutions, and governments demand a higher level of security, and thus far, blockchains have sacrificed security for simplicity and adoption. 

The market will coalesce around blockchains and digital assets that are inherently more secure and take attack vectors seriously by building systems that are resilient against bad actors and nation-states. The broad adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology will only come once the industry demonstrates a secure and auditable environment.

We believe there are two key aspects of security – degree of decentralization and security of the underlying smart contracting language. Contact our team at info@chia.net to learn more..

Inclusive access to global, highly decentralized finance 

The Chia blockchain is one of the most decentralized blockchains ever, with more than 100,000 nodes around the world operating the network, 3-4X as many as Bitcoin. Decentralization offers more security and resilience to the network and users. Through our revolutionary pooling protocol, each of those 100,000+ farmers are the actual entities assembling and signing each block. That means the Chia Nakamoto Coefficient is more than 70 while Bitcoin’s is 4 and Ethereum is 1 to 2.

Since each smart contract is part of a Chia coin owned by users in their wallet, there is no central contract to attack or exploit like in Ethereum. Hackers would need to attack each Chia user instead, making it inherently more secure than Ethereum, where hackers attack the centralized contract. Proof of Stake puts users at significant risk through centralization, which may allow a small number of highly-invested individuals or organizations to effectively control the network’s decision-making, development, and future. 

Security of smart-contracting language

ChiaLisp is a version of Lisp with additional operators specific to blockchains and smart contracts. The language enforces that developers use Lisp’s Functional Programming (FP) paradigm, as opposed to being state-based, making it easier to secure.

Completely sandboxed. Chialisp resource utilization is completely controlled. The language needs to be run on half a million computers, so it is important that the program cannot reach out and affect anyone’s machine in an unintended way. A lisp program is evaluated and therefore cannot spawn any new processes or interact with the system it is running on.

Inherently interoperable. Every smart coin in the Chia ecosystem, no matter how complex, is fundamentally a coin with a smart contract built in. With Chialisp, all smart coins are interoperable since code and data is represented the same, as lists (Homoiconicity). Any smart coin should be able to interact or communicate with any other smart coin, regardless of whether either coin was specifically designed to do so.

Auditability. The Chialisp Virtual Machine uses the minimal, simple, regular syntax needed for a complete blockchain programming language that is Turing complete. Auditors capable of reading Chialisp will be able to clearly understand the smart contract logic, knowing there will be almost no unintended behavior (also known as side effects) that can occur to alter the expected functionality of the smart contract.

Chia focused on auditability, interoperability, and security to provide an alternative to those broadly used and difficult-to-audit development environments, which create vectors of attack and are a recurrent source of dangerous and costly bugs.