Chia is the first enterprise-grade digital money. We are building the Chia Network to improve the global financial and payments systems. Chia is using a new consensus algorithm for a new blockchain called Proof Of Space and Time being created by Bram Cohen, the best network protocol engineer alive and creator of BitTorrent.
Compared to other cryptocurrencies, Chia is vastly less resource intensive and will have improved security due to it’s far more decentralized blockchain. Chia is adopting more modern cryptographic tools to enable richer smart transaction capabilities. Additionally, Chia will use it’s strategic reserve to ease volatility of the coin.
Proof of Space is a cryptographic technique where provers show that they allocated unused hard drive space. In order to be used as a consensus method, Proof of Space is tied to Proof of Time. This ensures that block times have regular times between them, and increases the overall security of the blockchain. Farming rewards via Proof of Space are directly proportional to the amount of space you have in the Network.
We have academic papers and presentations that give detail about our new consensus algorithm and blockchain software. In 2019 we revealed our Green Paper outlining the construction of Proofs of Space and Time and illustrating many of the design choices of Chia. There is also a 2019 talk from Mariano Sorgente at MIT on how to achieve Nakamoto consensus with Proof of Space and VDFs.
Bram Cohen presented at Stanford on February 2018 on Proofs of Space. Our advisors, Dan Boneh, Benedikt Bünz, and Ben Fisch published a survey of VDFs which are the underlying technology of Proof of Time. Lipa Long published an explanation of class groups that our Proofs of Time is based on. Bram presented Beyond Hellman’s Time-Memory Trade-Offs with Applications to Proofs of Space at BPASE ‘18 in January 2018 based on the academic paper and these slides by Hamza Abusalah. Ben Fisch gave a talk at BPASE 2018 in January 2018 on Verifiable Delay Functions. Bram spoke at Blockchain at Berkeley (which starts about 20:00) in March 2018 with slides. Bram gave a talk at BPASE 2017 in January 2017 on removing waste with Proofs of Space and Time (slides).
Bram gave a talk at SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar about data structures for scaling Bitcoin with slides and Merkle Set code. Bram gave a talk at SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar about removing waste from cryptocurrencies.
No. Chia is written from scratch by a renowned team.
Mining requires expensive single use hardware that wastes electricity and causes centralization while farming leverages existing empty harddisk space distributed on nodes around the globe.
Chia has a novel business model to both lower volatility of the coin and increase adoption. It lowers volatility by allowing us to loan Chia and manage the interest rates of those loans as well as other tools. To drive adoption, we are going to loan Chia to Global 5000 companies who will use it to pay their international vendors less expensively, quickly, and more secure.
After you download the Chia node software, the drive will be plotted in the background and once the plotting is complete, it will begin farming. Additionally, farming does not require much bandwidth or CPU.
After the Chia pre-farm, Chia will offer farming rewards every 5 minutes. Over the first 15 years the farming rewards will be halved at the end of each 5th year and from year 16 to infinity the rewards will remain constant leading to ever decreasing inflation rates.
Chia is likely to be available on most global exchanges shortly after it’s launched.
Yes, while we are making a huge effort to architect the blockchain securely, we have already released a BLS Signature library, a VDF/Proof of Time implementation, and a Proof of Space implementation. BLS Signatures allow for better custody and control of transactions on the blockchain, and POT and POS are both critical to our consensus algorithm.
No. Chia is not planning an ICO. Instead, our goal is to take the company public on American markets before we launch the network. This way, shareholders can share risk and return with management with transparency and disclosure. The Chia digital money is meant to be a useful payment instrument and not an investment opportunity. Chia intends to complete a fully compliant SEC registered IPO and will come to market as market-timing is amenable.
We hope to launch Mainnet as soon as it’s done. Software development is difficult to predict beforehand as it’s often over budget and behind schedule. Keep up to date here on our website, on Keybase, and on our mailing list as we continue to release open source software and updates regarding our IPO plans.
We believe that more eyes on our code will only make it better. For example, the results of our VDF Competition produced a VDF implementation whose runtime was 80% faster than our original implementation.
Chia has created three new core inventions of math. Firstly, Chia created the first intended for production BLS Signatures library. Secondly, Chia will be the first production use of class groups for cryptography. Finally, Chia created Proof of Space and Time for Nakamoto consensus.
When Bitcoin was developed it was not foreseen that a new type of chip could vastly outperform the computers everyone owns. What was intended to be decentralized network is now controlled by a small number of actors. The folks who currently control the Bitcoin Network feel they have an advantage as is and can’t change the protocol even when it’s clear that it should be. Chia has had ten years to study the new digital money ecosystem we clearly see how to build it better.
We believe that Chia coins will be less volatile due to the nature of our planned public company status which will allow financial institutions to hedge and leverage coins and equity and our ability to use the Chia Strategic Reserve to reduce volatility in the Chia in the market.
Chia will be pre-farming it’s coins to help stabilize the coins through Chia’s novel business plan of lending Chia.
No. It’s expensive, slow and antiquated. International payments are slow, expensive and insecure. International SWIFT wires take 1-5 days. CitiBank often charges up to 3% spreads and few other banks are in more than 1-2 countries. International wire fraud losses are very large.
You can email us at [email protected] or join us on Keybase.
Our hope is that Chia will be supported by point of sale systems and consumer payment apps all over the world. For example, if you pay for a coffee at Tully’s in England with your GrabPay app from Thailand, it should “just work” without you needing to know it was paid in Chia.
Or, for example, if services like Venmo or Cash App aren’t available where you live, using Chia will be far less of a hassle than executing a slow and expensive wire transfer. Using legacy banking to send and convert cash across borders is cumbersome, slow and expensive, and while alternative money transfer services might be faster, they’re not cheap: Western Union can charge upwards of 10% in transfer fees.
The technology will be completely open source and accessible, and anyone will be able to build a new wallet without our permission. We will help wallet, exchange, and merchant processing partners with support and integration services, joint marketing and lending for liquidity.