CNS has finally launched their ".xch" vanity name service for xch addresses, joining Namesdao who has already been live on mainnet since last year.

For whatever reason, a large part of the community was unaware that "name collisions", where two different people own the same ".xch" name on different services, were going to be a problem.

We raised this issue ~6 months ago in this post when Namedao launched, as even before then, both Namesdao and Chia Name Service had telegraphed their intention to utilize the ".xch" extension for their respective services. Neither service nor the community took action to mitigate the issue and both services continued to develop and ulitmately begin issuing ".xch" names.

Hopefully this post can answer some of the community's questions on what options the community has moving forward, as well as a what Chia Network Inc.'s official stance on the issue is.

I highly doubt this will be the last post XCHcentral makes on Chia Name Services and don't expect the name collision issue to be solved in the immediate future.

Chia Network Inc. ("CNI") official response

Might as well start with the question I think of the community would be most interested in, where does Chia Network Inc. fall on the issue?

I had the opportunity to have a brief email exchange with J Eckert, VP of Ecosystem Operations for Chia Network Inc. Below are excerpts / Q&A from that conversation.

JM - I fully understand CNI's position (not just on this issue) of striving to be more of a hands-off "custodian" for the ecosystem whenever they can, but the fact remains that at this early stage of community development, many farmers take the approach of "I'll wait until CNI blesses a service before I use it". I believe it would be great for the community to have an official response on a few points to give a general sense of direction for action CNI may take in the future and calm some of the tension/anxiety.

J Eckert - Happy to help here where I can. You are right overall in that CNI would prefer to remain hands off on this. We want the ecosystem to let it's own market determine what the collective consensus is on what provider should be the "source of truth" of the .xch domain in particular, and once there is a clear outcome we will support that one. Until then we have no desire to "put our thumb on the scale", as it were.

JM - What is CNI's plan for implementing name servies into the official client?

J Eckert - We have no immediate plans to implement any one service here and now into the client, simply because our roadmap for the next handful of releases is already stuffed to the gills vs our capabilities. Long term our plan is to adopt services that have bubbled up to the surface within the ecosystem and have established a clear standardization by consensus of the community and are obvious market leaders.

JM - Is it fair to assume that a CHIP would be required for any Name Service that wishes to be implemented into the official client?

J Eckert - No. We would not require that for adoption. In this case, Namesdao was given the advice that proposing a standard via a CHIP was the fastest way to get global consensus and adoption by multiple wallet developers, which would in theory lead to a standard that not only they develop on but other providers might as well for universal compatibility, which would then inevitably lead to us then adopting it also. However, that is not a hard requirement for us to adopt something. That said we are going to be far more likely to adopt something well defined in a CHIP with clear documentation than we would a bespoke system only one wallet uses (unless that example is an industry leader by a large margin, in which case it would be far more likely).

JM - Would CNI implement multiple Name Services using different implementations and different CHIPs? Or are CNS (or any other hopeful that wishes to start a Name Service) that wish to be in the official client forced to work on amending the CHIP-0009 standard now that it has been moved to final?

J Eckert - Once we get to the point where we can slot these things into the wallet, we would gladly adopt more than one format so long as it made sense to do so and there is compatibility within the wallet and the name resolutions were not in conflict with each other. IE we would not adopt two services that have the same .abc extension and we would prefer to wait for one to be the market leader, or for two different systems that caused technological conflicts under the hood in other ways.

JM - Also, just want to confirm that Chia Name Services does have a license to the Chia trademark as they have indicated.

J Eckert - They do, yes.

JM - Finally, any other commentary on this matter, or really anything else that you'd like to put out an official response on!

J Eckert - In a more ideal world, we would like to get to the state where our reference wallet has a plugin system and we don't have to incorporate any of these things by hand, and users can just drop in extensions from the service provider of their choice for not just DNS but also things like default explorers and NFT sites. We're a long way from that state however as there are higher priority things we are focusing on in the near term, and truth be told in a few years from now we expect our wallet to be one of the least-used options out there as folks gravitate towards others... much as we see in other crypto ecosystems. All that being said, it IS open source and we always welcome pull requests from community contributors!

Thank you again J for taking the time to answer these questions on a Friday afternoon!

How we got here

A quick timeline of certain development events for both projects:

Both services began / announced at similar times:

• Chia Name Service (CNS)

  • July 2022 - Twitter account created

  • 2022-10-29 - Testing begins

  • 2023-02-07 - CNS mainnet server launched. Final testing before public registration begins

  • 2023-02-14 - ".xch" names available to register on mainnet / name resolution integrated with the team's Pawket mobile wallet, open source reference code available

• Namesdao

  • August 2022 - Twitter account created

  • 2022-08-08 - Namesdao allows for registration of "triple underscore .xch names"

  • 2022-10-12 - Namesdao begins registration of "no underscore .xch names"

  • 2022-10-18 - Namesdao makes the first commit for CHIP-0009

  • 2023-02-16 - CHIP-0009 moved to final status

Honestly, if you look at the timeline of events, the development for both services is rather similar, just with two very different approaches.

Both projects announced within weeks of eachother.

The CNS team began testing of their functional service ~2 weeks after Namesdao opened registration for "no underscore .xch names".

However, you'll notice from the above timeline, when Namesdao had opened registration, they had yet to push forward with their formal CHIP that would provide a standard for implementation for ecosystem wallets and projects.

While Namesdao was pushing their standard forward in public, CNS was conducting testing and refining their standard in private.

The end result? Both services are ready to be implemented by ecosystem projects within days of echother. Those that wish to implement Namesdao have CHIP-0009 to follow, and those that wish to implement CNS have the reference code from the Pawket wallet / talking with the CNS dev team.

So what now?

Where we go from here and which service ends up being viewed as the issuer of the "true" .xch names is ultimately up to you, the community. If you've read the above, you understand that CNI is purposefully not supporting one service over the other.

I'd like to be clear, that at this point in time, much like Chia Netowrk Inc., the XCHcentral team does not support either team's claim to the .xch extention over the other. The situation has some nuance to it and is developing daily.

Namesdao pushing forward

Currently, I believe it is undeniable that the Namesdao team has been pressing their first mover advantage by being quite present in the community with giveaways, bounties, and awarding their own "innovation grants".

However, it's worth pointing out, that CHIP-0009 has just been finalized and at this time, there are no ecosystem wallets that support sending funds to a Namesdao .xch name other than the "Namesdao .xch Wallet", which is a fork of official Chia Wallet by the Namesdao team, and the Goby browser extension wallet using Namesdao's developed Dapp.^[1]

Namesdao has indicated that now that CHIP-0009 has been finalized, it's been communicated by a few ecosystem wallet developers that they will be moving to integrate Namesdao name resolution quickly, although no announcements are ready at the time of this post.

Chia Name Service's Plan

I was able to receive comment from Chia Name Service team on their current plans.

Hiya - We intend to propose a CHIP, but we have our own schedule and pace. We don't want external factors to hinder our progress. We take the writing of CHIPs very seriously and adhere to rigorous standards. We will propose the CHIP when the time is right.


In addition, it's worth noting that the majority of CNS's code has already been open-sourced and integrated into the code for Pawket. The design logic and structure can be gleaned from the code itself. However, we recognize the need for a more user-friendly document that is easily understandable for non-technical users. We're actively working on this, but it will take some time to complete.


We have chosen to build on the Chia blockchain because we value its decentralized and secure nature. This kind of chain has a strong ability to endure, which makes it possible to build long-lasting services on it. Therefore, our focus is not on competing with other teams to see who can release .xch or CHIP faster, but rather on who can maintain their services for a longer period of time.

Honestly, I don't think the CNS team is too far behind (at least on the tech side of things) given they are live on mainnet and integrated with their own Pawket mobile wallet (which is definitely "a" leading, if not "the" leading mobile wallet at this time), with reference code for others to use.

Conclusions (for now)

While being first isn't everything, the fact remains that Namesdao has been putting in work with the community and working to attract 3rd party devs.

Much like CNI has indicated they would not integrate multiple services using the same extension (in this case .xch), I would likely assume that ecosystem devs would similarily choose to only integrate one solution per extension^[2].

If Namesdao can push forward 3rd party wallet adoption quickly now that CHIP-0009 is final, it's tough to see how the community would choose Chia Name Service as the preferred ".xch" issuer.

However, Chia Name Service isn't out of it yet. If CNS can come out with their own CHIP or at least detailed integration documentation for 3rd party wallets soon, as in - not soon™, but this should be a top priority for the team NOW, and drive adoption, then the community has some things to consider.

Either way, both services are likely here to stay, but eventually, one will likely need to cede the .xch name to the other.^[3] Then, whoever wins gets to look forward to the next fight for ".xch", which will occur when Chia Network Inc. pushes forward .xch as an ICANN TLD, but that's an issue for another day.

Hopefully this post will serve its purpose as a jumping off point for additional discussions within the community on the technical and social merits of both projects. I'm sure it will not be our last post on the matter.

Also, let's keep it civil. Both teams deserve your respect. They ship code and are working to better the Chia ecosystem.

If you feel like supporting XCHcentral's writing like this, donations of XCH/NFTs can be sent to: xch1dwm59nranz0khzfzmv0j9g4tpwe4fx7ven0ptr9hufs2c0kgesxq8r7mws

1. Yes, there's the "Frodo wallet", which ironically is a fork of the Pawket mobile wallet developed by the same team as Chia Name Service. There's been some discussion about whether or not certain licenses were respected, which I haven't had time to investigate yet, so I chose to leave it out of the body of blog post at this time ↩︎

2. although there definitely are UI friendly ways to integrate both services... this post is already too long, maybe we explore them in additional posts ↩︎

3. Personally, I see nothing wrong with "name.ndao and name.cns", but I understand the prestige of ".xch" ↩︎

Well, it's been a minute since we've had a nice Runtime Rambling. Life has been a little busy, but hopefully I'll be able to get back into a normal writing rhythm soon^[1].

Dexie - Quick Q&A

If you've traded a CAT or NFT on Chia recently, there's a pretty good chance you
used Dexie either to upload your offer file, or to find an offer file to accept.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of utilizing Dexie... here is the team's short and sweet description from their site:

Dexie is a peer-to-peer exchange for Chia offer files. Offer files are completely decentralized and trustless.
Dexie holds no custody of coins, they always stay in the wallet of the maker until the offer is accepted, at which point the assets are transferred securely between the maker and taker within a single transaction on the blockchain without any intermediary.

If you want to see Dexie in action, the best thing I can find right now is this clip from a Digital Spaceport Video.^[2]

Anyways, this post is about the Q&A:

Questions were asked to the head of Dexie, "dns", over a Discord conversation the past week or so.

Q: Can you give us a short background of the team and and what their roles are? (Whatever information you feel comfortable sharing.)

We are a very small team and have worked together for over a decade in software development. We have a routine, are on the same page and understand the vision for dexie. This helps us to have efficient meetings and push updates out fast.

Q: How did you get into Chia? / How long have you been following the project?

Originally I read about Chia in or around 2017 on Hackernews and signed up for the mailing list. When the Chia Business Whitepaper came out, I started plotting for the Mainnet launch and I am farming since.

Q: How/Why did you decide to start dexie?

I am involved in DeFi because the freedom for anyone to participate, the full transparency on chain and the possible combination of autonomous protocols, intrigue me.
Offer Files make it very easy to bootstrap an exchange on Chia, you basically only need to host files and run a node. We launched dexie as a very simple version to get feedback and some traction and are transitioning to a full DeFi platform over time.

Q: Where did the name Dexie and the Blue Duck come from?

dexie originates from decentralized exchange. During prototyping the idea of dexie being a duck came up because it’s a great name for a duck! Blue looks good.

Q: Have you applied for or received a Chia Cultivation Grant? (I understand that this may be a sensitive question that might not be able to be answered, and I can respect that)

Nothing we could share right now.

Q: What made you decide to go with a DAO monetization strategy?

In my opinion that is the best way to operate a decentralized exchange, because you need a decentralized organisational structure. Since profits are fully on chain, it makes sense to distribute them on chain too. A platform token is the perfect way for this.
Ultimately it's all about liquidity, and a platform with a native token economy, where liquidity providers own the protocol and can vote on proposals, is naturally much more attractive.

Q: Are you at all concerned about the legal implications of issuing DAO tokens which may be considered an unregistered security? / Have you consulted with any legal or financial experts?^[3]

We are following legislation closely, but I wouldn't say we are concerned. We haven't done an ICO and have no investor allocation and we are not from the US.
Right now we just want to build a great product and show everyone whats possible in DeFi.

Q: How soon do you expect the Dexie AMM to launch? Timelines are hard, and there are always a lot of moving pieces, but are we anticipating ~3 months or so? Or more like 6+ months?

I would say more like 6+ months. We will probably see more advanced combined offers and DAO governance tools on dexie first.

Q: When does the dev portion of the DBX start its monthly distribution flow?

The team distribution will start after the community Airdrop is complete in early November. Team members have no intention to sell this allocation, because then they would also give away their stake in dexie (voting rights, revenue share). During the distribution phase it’s all about accumulating DBX.

Q: What level of fees or spread are you anticipating you’ll be able to generate from transactions?

This entirely depends on the market and the competition. Chia needs more usage and a bigger token ecosystem for AMMs to perform well. Having a secure wrapped BTC or ETH, for example, could attract many DeFi users from other chains, which would be a huge plus for liquidity.

Q: Anything else you would like the Chia ecosystem to know about Dexie, the team, or any other projects you might have?

There is an ongoing community Airdrop of dexie bucks until the end of October.
Everyone who has been following dexie on Twitter before the cutoff date, is eligible. It’s claimable at the DBX tab on dexie.space.

Anyway, we can't wait to show everyone whats coming for dexie. Stay tuned!

Chia Name Service Competition Heating Up

Currently, to the best of my knowledge, there are 3 main competitors in the "Name Service" business on Chia:

Namesdao
Go4Me
ChiaNameService

About a month and a half ago, I had written up an article on Namesdao and their launch of "triple underscore" and "single underscore" .xch names, as well as some potential pitfalls. You can read that article here.

Since then, a few things have happened. First the Namesdao team of BenAtreidesVing and Orc have continued to build and press their first mover advantage.

Namesdao just finished allowing people with "single underscore" names upgrade to "no underscore" names - and have been open registration of "no underscore" .xch names.

Currently we hold the Namesdao names:
XCHcentral.xch
XCHcentralJM.xch
XCHcentralKT.xch

If you want to register a name, check it out here:

How do you register a .xch name?

Details at https://t.co/CxTx1hhqdl

A few bits of good news:
🧵#chia #xchname #chiablockchain #Namesdao #chianfts

— Namesdao.xch the Name Service for Chia 🌱 🌱 (@theNamesdao) October 15, 2022

Also... Ben & Orc, I know you've heard it before, but please invest in a front end web developer! A little investment is going to go a long way when onboarding new users - especially when you'll be competing against other services! First impressions matter.

Yes, the competition is coming soon! I'm not sure how much longer Namesdao will be the only ".xch" name issuer in town. The Chia Name Service team is internally debating changing their implementation to get a quicker launch.

I have to admit, our team have some disputes on how @ChiaNameService should be implemented:
1. Should we go with working quick-and-dirty solution?
2. Should we go without enough decentralization?

🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/zzW6DykGnf

— Wizard Glacier🌱 (@icerdesign) October 10, 2022

It should go without saying but, @icerdesign I'm happy to check out your product and talk about whichever implementation you ultimately decide on whenever you're ready!

Finally, we have Go4Me, by Josh Painter (aka @endertown). So far, Go4Me's name service solution has been different from Namesdao and Chia Name Service. Go4Me just simply doesn't care about a ".xch" namespace. The service just uses your Twitter username as your Go4Me account. You can view mine here.

You can take one look at this tweet by Josh and already know, he's doing something different. I'm sure I'll be giving Go4Me plenty of coverage as new features are implemented.

Domain names should be 🆓

And never expire ⏰

Maybe not tho 🤔

Need to 💵 bills like everybody 🤑

I want to have my 🍰 and 🍽️ it too

Might be impossible ⛔️

Gonna attempt it anyway 🤡

Or ☠️ trying

Otherwise this could be 😳

Doh 🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/5rZWNgo9cA

— 🌱 Josh Painter (@endertown) October 14, 2022

Evergreen Shipping Product!

Dylan and the Evergreen team have been hard at work shipping out their "Batch 2" of Evergreen "Miners"^[4]. It might not be the most exciting product for most OG's with their custom farms, but there's definitely a market for the product as evidenced by the sales! Congrats to the team, we'll be watching!

Dream come true @Evergreenminer pic.twitter.com/z5jdBBGNNl

— dylan🌲🌱🧡 (@dylanmrose) October 15, 2022

Digital Spaceport Builds a Datacenter in His Garage

It looks pretty fantastic. I'm only slightly jealous that I don't have the space for this much equipment in my current home.

Much closer. Just some networking now. pic.twitter.com/0FI5Rjdn16

— Digital Spaceport (@gospaceport) October 12, 2022

Trick-or-ChiChi

Happy Halloween! ChiChi has some treats for the community coming "soon". Follow ChiChi on Twitter so you don't miss out!

Boo pic.twitter.com/XZZynp2zJY

— ChiChi 🌱 (@ChiChiverse_NFT) October 16, 2022

If you think there's anything cool that I missed recently. Tweet at me!
Tweet to @xchcentral_jm
We're having fun and hope you are too.

If you feel like supporting our projects & writing like this, donations of XCH / CATs can be sent to: xch1dwm59nranz0khzfzmv0j9g4tpwe4fx7ven0ptr9hufs2c0kgesxq8r7mws

1. Not that I ever really had one... writing what I consider to be "acceptable" quality posts is actually somewhat time consuming and it's easy for day to day life to cause a post to slip by a day, which becomes a week, which becomes a month. At that point you start to wonder to yourself, why am I even writing this longform content? Just post Twitter threads and bask in the instant gratification! And yet, here we are ↩︎

2. Maybe harass Jerod on Twitter to make an actual intro to Dexie video. I honestly don't know how large the viewership would be given that Dexie is pretty intuitive - but hey, I'm sure someone would benefit from it (especially new users to the community). Actually, it would be a good opportunity to educate new users on how Offer Files work as well. Cross promotion opportunity too... If its a nice enough little beginners video, maybe Dexie embeds it on their site as a starting point for new users, which in turn helps new people find Digital Spaceport videos, or they kick him a little compensation for some sponsored spots in some videos. Win Win. Jerod are you writing this down? Just don't forget my 10% 😉 ↩︎

3. More on this topic coming soon in a seperate post... Not neccessarily specific to Dexie, but just about DAO governance tokens in general. ↩︎

4. I've debated Dylan about Miner vs Farmer several times. I believe there's a very clear and important distinction between Mining and Farming, but he has his reasons. ↩︎

This post was a standalone Namesdao only post. Then it was a Runtime Rambling headline post. Then I went down a research rabbit hole that made it evolve into a Namesdao/Crypto Name Service post.

I test in prod and write on the go. Deal with it.

Intro to Namesdao

As most of the Chia Twitter community is aware, Namesdao has launched their Chia Name Service, where farmers are able to spend a small amount of AIR, or SBX, or XCH to register Namesdao ".xch" names (example: _XCHcentral.xch), which are minted to an NFT on the Chia blockchain.

Then using their open source python script, you're able to send a transaction to another user using one of their .xch addresses, rather than needing the other party to provide you with a full XCH address.

The project is being led by @BenAtreidesVing and @RightSexyOrc. Relevant links to the project where you can find out more information: Twitter, Website

To learn how to register yourself a single-underscore address, check out Ben's Twitter thread here:

Single-underscore .xch names are now open for registration

Reg your Namesdao .xch name
w/Goby https://t.co/orOG87rbmH
Or Chia wallet: https://t.co/BL4TtEgoNl

Details follow:🧵@theNamesdao #Namesdao @RightSexyOrc #chiablockchain #chiadapps #chiadevs

— _BenAtreidesVing.xch 🌱 Namesdao 🌱 Learn Chia (@BenAtreidesVing) August 19, 2022

Rather than drill down into the project too hard this close to launch, I instead just took a little time to ask @RightSexyOrc some initial questions so I could get a better feel of where he and @BenAtreidesVing envision the project going.

Namesdao - Quick Q&A

I think the biggest question I have is… why the attachment to the .xch name? The service can function using basically any extension it wants... or no extension at all. I understand it from a marketing perspective, but as far as I know, there’s 1 or 2 other projects doing something similar who intend to also issue ".xch" names.

The analogy is to ENS on the Ethereum chain with .eth, and that has been carried across to other chains, e.g. .sol on Solana.
We are the leader, live and welcoming to the full Chia community and new people getting start with Chia. More than 1,000 Namesdao .xch names have been registered. You can register in any of 3 ways, including an extremely user-friendly dapp for browser extension wallets. We feature a free tier too, so that anyone can have an .xch name with just a few mojos they might get from a faucet in a new wallet.

And you intend to support 3 underscores, 2, 1, and 0?

Yes!

Seems like initially you guys were pretty anti-web address, but then added the feature anyways. More plans for web features?

It was not our focus. We did a multi-stage rollout to be able to get feedback from the community. We did get many questions plus interest in domain name capabilities. We did some testing initially with DNS CNAME records. We look to offer DNS IP # lookup support or similar in the future. The webpage is to give a preview, an instant home page, and a way to be able to receive NFTs and payments easily.

Also interesting with expiration / ongoing fee. Why not just a one time registration like some other services?

Here the pattern is ENS in Ethereum. While one-time reg seems nice, one can end up with a huge inventory of dead, dormant names, which perhaps is not ideal for the community. Additionally, annual renewal can permit lower annual costs than one-time reg, plus an ongoing budget to support further development, non-IPFS hosting, and the free name registration tier.

Anything else you want to add / think people should know about the project?

You could imagine holding your Namesdao .xch name in a multi-sig, time-limited, social-recovery wallet if you'd like, which could limit certain risks. You can sell your .xch address using a regular offer. You can even buy one right now, several are for sale on Dexie

plans: Expand beyond our existing decentralized name resolution to support decentralized name registry. We will also promote some of our existing bounties and add more to further support development of the ecosystem and community.

Oh, and per https://www.namesdao.org/about.html , "We help out! 5% of all initial registration fees received will go to a charity DAO to be set up supporting education, open source and freedom-oriented initiatives. We thank all of the community members who've helped us along the way. "

Anything else going on in Orc Nation?

Right now we are focused on Namesdao. We'd like to use our Time Machine dapp, for time-locked token issuance, with Namesdao compensation of team members, so we look forward to finishing that up at some point. Time Machine is designed to help align incentives for ongoing and long-term value creation and collaboration.

Parting thoughts

As we've seen on other chains, there's no doubt that a name service like Namesdao will eventually be a vital service/tool for the Chia ecosystem.

While writing this post I went down a bit of a research rabbit hole on Crypto Name Services ("CNS") available on other chains like ENS for ETH, and Bonafida's Naming Service for SOL. I definitely want to find some time to digest what's going on with other established chains.^[1]

Also, there are a few other CNS projects I'm aware of building for Chia including Go4.me and ChiaNameService that I'll be interested to experiment with when they're up and running.
(I feel like I've seen at least one other service on Twitter, please let me know if I'm missing anyone and I'll add them here)

Who moves first
For most users, we're currently in a chicken or the egg dilema for name services. To have it's full utility, the name service needs to be integrated across the ecosystem (or at least into a major wallet or two). Until then, the service will likely remain a cool proof of concept.^[2]

However, in order for wallet devs to spend time integrating a name service, they're likely going to want to see a decent userbase / potentially be compensated for their dev time.

To encourage these integrations to happen, the Namesdao team is offering bounties of their NAME tokens over on their website's about page found here.

Update - The chicken fires first!
While writing this post has taken far too long... the Namesdao team has just about shipped a new feature! Currently, they're working on a fork of the official Chia GUI that implements Namesdao addresses to be used in the send bar! Whether this will use on-chain lookup, or if it will be using Namesdao's cached lookup remains to be seen.

nothing new in here... 😉🤤🌱💚

Could this new detail help other projects?

Register a Namesdao .xch name for free:
w/Goby https://t.co/krEMq5uuVH
Or Chia wallet: https://t.co/dVJApXt9kU#Namesdao @theNamesdao pic.twitter.com/Upw8vz8VeN

— _RightSexyOrc.xch 🌱 Namesdao (@RightSexyOrc) August 24, 2022

Potential Issues

TLD Fights
Fights over Top Level Domains are just starting. Unstoppable Domains is fighting Handshake and is soon going to be fighting against ICANN, if they aren't already. Things are going to get weird.

Now lets apply the same problem to our little Chia ecosphere.
Namesdao offers .xch addresses and lets assume that two other legitimate competitors offer .xch addresses, resulting in name collisions.

You send a payment to Alice.xch, which can go to one of three places depending on which wallet you're using and which name service(s) they have implemented. Ugh. Best case, you select which name service to resolve with through from a dropdown and save that contact to an address book in your wallet? Still ugh. Overall, the ecosystem is gonna resolve the issue one way or another, unless competitors are scared off by Namesdao's first mover advantage on .xch.

Note - Go4.me has avoided this issue (and potentially a few others) through the use of Twitter to register accounts (big help in avoiding name confusion) and almost certainly ensures it avoids name collisions (highly doubt anyone would be silly enough to try and start a competing service using Go4.me's name convention, and it's even more doubtful that legitimate wallets would be silly enough to implement said imposter... But for now, Go4.me is basically a glorified address book (honestly, which I do find useful given the names correspond to Twitter handles). I'm sure Josh will be adding new features soon. He has been a little pre-occupied with creating SeedSnapp (you should check it out, and I'll almost certainly be writing about it)

Name Confusion within Namesdao
Depending on how the Namesdao team implements its planned support of zero, single, double, and triple underscore names... There is quite a bit of concern for Namesdao to cause name confusion with itself.

Maybe Alice is light on funds and has registered the free ___ILoveChia.xch, but Bob has registered __ILoveChia.xch, and of course Charlie was quick on the draw and paid up to register _ILoveChia.xch, and then Danielle registers ILoveChia.xch (when the Namesdao team makes that available). Ugh.

I know the Namesdao team is moving quickly, and we're early on the product, but felt it was neccessary to raise the issue for this article as I believe its already possible to have this type of name confusion with some ___ and _ names that have been made available.

I'm sure we'll have a follow up on this issue the next time I write about Namesdao as I didn't pressure Orc for an answer on this issue during this initial Q&A... And I've gone a little off the rails with this post from its initial short and sweet Q&A intentions.

Conclusion

Overall, the work being done by Namesdao deserves your attention and I applaud the time and dedication that Orc and Ben have committed to the project.

If you feel like supporting XCHcentral's writing like this, donations of XCH/NFTs can be sent to: xch1dwm59nranz0khzfzmv0j9g4tpwe4fx7ven0ptr9hufs2c0kgesxq8r7mws

Or I guess I should be saying you can send them to _XCHcentral.xch as well!

1. Look, yeah... at their core, CNS have a pretty simple base function — resolve a vanity address to a blockchain address. What is there to digest? Well, there are some other features that CNS offer like displaying your NFT collection and linking to your social media accounts or website, which are also pretty easy to evaluate. However, I'm not just interested in WHAT these CNS do, but HOW they do it... and I'm not just talking about the technical how, but also the overall user experience. Sometimes you need to experience the competition to gain frame of reference. For example, I've bought a few NFTs on ETH from OpenSea. It wasn't a terrible experience by any means, but it's blown away by the same experience using Dexie on Chia. If I hadn't tested out the user experience on ETH, I wouldn't know what those poor souls are enduring to trade their pixels back and forth. ↩︎

2. Your average farmer is likely going to just keep copy pasting addresses rather than use python scripts they don't understand. ↩︎

Relatively quiet week in the ecosystem... everyone seems to be just waiting around for the NFT1 standard to drop. Just a couple of larger stories to touch on for now.

XCHscan New Ownership - Quick Q&A

XCHscan has been saved! The explorer will continue to operate after being purchased by tjump! This is a huge win for the community as robust full featured blockchain explorers are a fundamental building block of a healthy ecosystem.

I had the opportunity to briefly message tjump this morning and ask some basic questions about the purchase and his plan moving forward.

Q: First, who are you? (I made it clear that there is no pressure for tjump to share any personally identifiable information)

Hi, I'm @tjumpx on Twitter, an entrepreneur/developer fascinated by cryptocurrency and other decentralized networks.

Q: How did you get into Chia? / Been a farmer for a long time? Any other crypto you’ve been into?

I first head about Chia around the time of their first raise in 2017 or 2018. The concept of Proof of Space instantly captivated me and I was eagerly waiting for its release since.
 
I actually do not farm Chia, since Chia farming is really all about recycling/reclaiming unused resources, and I dislike physically settling in one place for too long.

Q: Why did you decide to purchase XCHscan?

An explorer is an essential part of a public blockchain network, and XCHscan is in my opinion the most promising incarnation of one for Chia.
 
When I saw the post about their intentions to shut down the site, I felt it was a mistake. They were apparently disappointed by the slow pace of growth of the Chia ecosystem. On the other hand, I have high conviction in the future of Chia and its ecosystem, and I do not need the site to be profitable now. So it was a perfect match, and I was happy to reward the team for their great work building XCHscan up to this point.

Q: Are you just a one man show? Or do you have a team / plan to expand?

It is just me for now. I don't plan on keeping XCHscan a one person operation forever, but I would rather grow organically with the ecosystem rather than expand prematurely and be unable to support its operations.

Q: Overall, what’s your vision for the site?

I already have a full road map and many features I want to explore, but ideas are just that. Expect visible developments to be slow at first as I work on solidifying the back-end.
 
The first features that are likely to come out soon™️ after that are of course CAT1 and NFT1 support.

Q: Anything else that you would like to share about yourself or the future of XCHscan?

I'm excited to be able to play a part into making cryptocurrency into something useful for people.
 
Anyone reading this, as an early member of the Chia community, is going to have the most salient criticism and advice. So please reach out to me on Twitter, Keybase or the Discord with any feedback about xchscan.com

Not So Stably

In case you weren't aware, Stably has been down for ~6 days as a result of their Chia node needing to be resynced from scratch.

Oh, Stably. I try my hardest to give you guys the benefit of the doubt. I really do. I want to like you guys... but you make it so damn difficult.

I understand the (sometimes) slow account approval process.^[1] I even understand the apprehension of ACH reversals that results in you setting low maximum deposits and it taking 10 business days for you to release funds!^[2]

But having your node go down and not recover within 1 business day? Ugh.

Adding on to this we typically don't host our own nodes and rely on other node providers. We understand there's a trust tradeoff here but we typically lack the scale to justify maintaining our own node infrastructure YET

— David (@dazhengzhang) June 23, 2022

Based on these replies to one of @DigitalSpaceport's tweets, I'm not 100% sure whether David Zhang (Stably Co-Founder & CTO) is saying that Stably overlooked backing up their own hosted node, or if they failed to instruct their 3rd party host to periodically back up their node... Either way, ugh.

Normally I wouldn't be this upset with a service having an outage with a newly implemented and emerging technology like Chia, but I feel that any time you're acting as a custodian for a customer's money, you should be held to a higher standard.^[3]

Ok, Stably... again, I want to like you guys. I want to recommend you as the best way to on-ramp fiat to the Chia ecosytem to current farmers. I want to recommend you to everyone that I "green pill" who asks "so how do I buy some of this XCH?".

You have an amazing opportunity ahead of your right now. Just like the rest of us, you're early to Chia. You have no other stablecoin competition on this chain. The impending launch of the NFT1 standard has the potential to bring an influx of new users who are going to want to get large amounts of fiat (or other crypto that you accept) onto the Chia Blockchain in the form of USDS to purchase art or XCH in a compliant KYC above board manner.

The Chia Community wants to see you succeed. We want to patronize your service. So please, help us promote you by being the best damn stablecoin on the best damn blockchain.

I genuinely do hope this is the first and last time I have to write a "Not so Stably" post.

Other Chains Migrating to PoST? Technically Possible

Yesterday Bram confirmed on Twitter that yes, it is technically possible for other L1s to adopt PoST and, most critically, for them to be compatible with existing Chia plots.

This is a pretty big prospect for existing Chia farmers, as co-farming your existing plots with another L1 in addition to Chia would provide a potentially large additional income stream with no incremental costs to you, the farmer.^[4]

If you're curious on some of the technical details, please refer to Bram's thread.

Good morning everyone. Over the weekend people were discussing how other L1s could adopt Proof of Space and Time, so I'll now explain

— Bram Cohen🌱 (@bramcohen) June 27, 2022

Last Thoughts

So that's about it for this post... Again, I feel like the entire community is just anxiously waiting on NFT1 release. Speaking of which, I should probably be devoting more time to getting Green Horizon ready!

If you think there's anything cool that I missed recently. Tweet at me!
Tweet to @xchcentral_jm
We're having fun and hope you are too.

If you feel like supporting our projects & writing like this, donations of XCH / CATs can be sent to: xch1dwm59nranz0khzfzmv0j9g4tpwe4fx7ven0ptr9hufs2c0kgesxq8r7mws

1. I've seen people complain on keybase report that their Stably Prime account took weeks or months to be approved, whereas mine was approved in a few hours. ↩︎

2. Please note that Stably does offer deposits by wire transfer and crypto deposits which have higher maximums an should clear for withdrawal more quickly. I have only tested ACH deposit at this point. ↩︎

3. I'm also slightly shocked to learn that I have better DevOps practices than Stably. When Katie and I were running the "pooling tracker" project I always had 3 nodes running in the house (2 live farming, 1 dedicated to RPC calls), with a weekly cold DB backup on a seperate server. We actually had our full node corrupt/freeze a couple times during the project, but were able to restore it to operational within an hour each time. Those of you who might have followed the project more closely know we did have some longer extended outtages, but those took a little longer to recover as they happened while we were asleep / out for the weekend / on a trip. ↩︎

4. ok yes, there is some form of additional electricity cost as a result of the additional partial lookups for the other chain, but that's relatively minor. ↩︎

Yup, this is going to be exactly what it sounds like. Basically one take writing about some current topics around the Chia ecosphere. I'm not calling this a monthly or a weekly, because I have no idea how often I'll post them!

Why are you doing this?

Well, we've been without XCHweekly and The Chia Plot posting their weekly news roundups for some time now. I think those were pretty nice for members of the ecosystem that aren't yet complete Twitter degenerates like some of us. Overall, I'm going to try and cover some topics that I find noteworthy, interesting, or just funny, and that some members of the community may have missed. Not sure how deep we'll go on some of these topics^[1] and I might sprinkle in some opinions and jokes as well.^[2]

Beyond just providing a "roundup" for the community, posts like these will help me stick to my plan of being a higher volume writer. Sitting down and writing one of the analytical pieces I have planned about something like the Blockchain Valuation Model takes some time to outline, write, and edit.^[3]

Now, this type of content is a little quicker to ship. Being quicker to ship does have some drawbacks. I'm pretty unlikely to actually proof read or edit whatever ramblings come out before I hit the 'Publish' button. Expect tpyos and not gud grammar.

Runtime Rambling #1

Ok... I think you understand what I'm doing, so here are the things I found amusing in the past week or so.

XCH number go up.

I don't really feel like I needed to tell anyone this, but number has been going up. And it's been entertaining. Usually people complain "wen number go up" but now the masses have switched to "number go up too fast, I was waiting to buy".

Price increase may or may not be a result of Bram tweeting Good Morning daily now.

Good morning

— Bram Cohen🌱 (@bramcohen) June 19, 2022

XCHscan is shutting down unless they can find a buyer

This sucks. I like XCHscan. We used their API when we launched our pool monitoring project to get it off the ground. Hopefully they can find a suitable buyer who will continue to operate the explorer.

PS. While the UI might not be as clean SpaceScan.io is pretty reliable and has an active dev team behind, rolling out new features every week. Definitely check them out if you haven't already.

We are closing https://t.co/3HV32JZSzn, unless we find a buyer in the next 2 weeks. Serious offers only, our DMs are open.

— xchscan.com (@xchscan) June 17, 2022

Digital Spaceport and Josh buy way too much hardware

Like seriously... check out their wrapup content. If you're in the market for a JBOD or a RAM plotter (or like 50 Tesla K40 GPUs) you can probably get a pretty good deal from them.

LET IT BE KNOWN that I am heretoforthwith claiming World Record for “Number of K40’s On Dining Room Table”

If nobody challenges in 24 hours it’s official. I didn’t make the rules. pic.twitter.com/leu8ySn3TG

— Josh Painter 🌱 (@endertown) June 20, 2022

JM tests plotting on a Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX vs 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6338 CPU

No, not me. The other JM^[4], JM Hands that works as the VP of Storage for Chia Network. I currently only fantasize about getting to work on Chia full time, but I digress.

Just watch the video if you want to see big numbers comparing bleeding edge hardware pushing the limits of how fast you can make a Chia plot.

Countdown to NFT1 standard release

Longtime community member Leafy_k has been counting down (well, up) daily to the release of the NFT1 standard... and is out of memes. Chia Network, please help him by releasing the standard soon. In the meantime, Chia Community, send the man some memes.

Day 30 of countdown to #nft1 on chia #blockchain. T-minus running out of soon memes? Anyone want to drop me some 🤣🤣

— leafy_k.XCH 🌱 (@ChiefLeaf313) June 20, 2022

Last Thoughts

Yeah... so that's about it for now. If you think there's anything cool that I missed recently. Tweet at me!
Tweet to @xchcentral_jm

We're having fun and hope you are too.^[5]

If you feel like supporting our projects & writing like this, donations of XCH / CATs can be sent to: xch1dwm59nranz0khzfzmv0j9g4tpwe4fx7ven0ptr9hufs2c0kgesxq8r7mws

1. If a topic is somewhat important or I find myself writing "too much" about it here, it'll probably end up getting a follow-up standalone post ↩︎

2. Who am I trying to fool... of course there will be opinions and jokes. But I'll probably try to keep the jokes mostly to footnotes. Why footnotes? Well, some people are boring and just want to quickly read the actual content and are unlikely to find these antics humorous. By keeping all of this fun stuff buried in the footnotes, we can get the best of both worlds. I get to have fun with my terrible jokes, but the boring people don't have to suffer through them. ↩︎

3. Beyond that... I'm not always in the right mindset or 'mood' to work on some of that content. You know that feeling. You come home from work, walk the dog, make some dinner, spend some amount of time with your family, and now it's starting to get late in the evening and you want to work on something, but don't really want to work on that thing. ↩︎

4. Or am I the other JM? — Don't worry, there's more than enough room for two JMs providing quality content in the community. Now, if some 3rd JM pops up, we can all agree that's likely too many JMs and we'll have to play a game of Jenga using 18TB HDDs, with the loser foregoing rights to the name within the confines of the Chia community ↩︎

5. I can't remember when I started signing off posts like this... but it's sorta a thing now. And honestly, I kinda like it. It's a good reminder that this is a hobby, and it should be fun. It really is why I'm doing this. It's fun. There are no ads (for now, and maybe forever, I really hate the aesthetic of flashing banner ads) and no other way we monetize this content beyond the 100% optional donations address (which, no one ever donates to lol)... but hopefully people will buy Katie & Parker's art when we start minting Green Horizon NFTs ↩︎

Projects that wander are not always lost.
XCHcentral has wandered, a lot. (But hopefully, no longer)

When we began XCHcentral, Katie and I (JM) had a clear vision and path. Create a central location for information and projects in the Chia community.

Before we even launched that version of the site, we wandered.

The Wandering

Our first detour was after the launch of the official pooling protocol in July 2021. For those of you who were farming during this time, you probably remember daily baseless claims on Twitter and Reddit accusing pool operators of underpaying or cheating earnings. (To be fair, outside of the major pools, there was at least one pool operator that admitted to lying about their pool's netspace)

Seeing an opportunity to develop a project that would fill a need in the community, we wandered.

We launched our Chia Pools project that tracked and published the payouts of our anonymous 10Tib farms with the major pools. (more on our decision to spin down the project in another post soon™... probably)

While maintaining the pooling project, which required a little more babysitting than we initially thought, we decided to wander a little more.

In private, we scoped and prototyped everything from a CAT database to a full on explorer. In the end, we came to the conclusion that either, there was already a team in the community operating a similar project well, or that the two of us weren't going to be able to scale a certain project at the quality level we wanted while maintaining our individual careers, family obligations, and some semblance of a social life outside of the Chia community. (I could only get away with – "pair coding by candlelight counts as a romantic date" for so long)

Suffering from a little burnout and frustration, we sat down and examined what types of projects will be the most sustainable for us going forward.

We were tired of wandering.

The Paths Forward

Ultimately we decided that we wanted to take multiple paths forward.

XCHcentral Blog - Reboot

The first path is what you're viewing now, a relaunched XCHcentral blog.

This will be a largely JM driven project. I love interacting with the community, learning from the expert engineers we have committed to Chia, and building new relationships. The content I'll look to cover here will largely reflect those broad interests. Additionally, there will almost certainly be more than a few posts about non-Chia topics like other blockchains, NFTs, and some meta posts about creating content in general. (you can almost certainly expect Green Horizon NFT update posts / more art process content from Katie... and maybe even some writing process posts from our writer Parker)

Despite what you might be inferring from this lengthy (and hopefully somewhat entertaining) post, I'm new to writing and can easily get caught up in a perpetual editing/revision loop. We'll do our best to avoid that.

That being said, if there's a topic you think needs more attention or if you have a community project you'd love to talk about, let me know! Tweet at or DM me on Twitter @XCHcentral_jm / or DM on keybase xchcentral_jm.

Green Horizon NFT

The other path we're excited to take is our Green Horizon NFT series.

Green Horizon is our premium NFT series we're launching on Chia. We'll be featuring both 1/1 hand painted oil on canvas profile pictures by our own Katie, as well as numbered limited edition "prints" of scenes to accompany the original short stories bring written by our head writer Parker.

Follow us @GreenHorizon so you don't miss out on any updates or behind the scenes releases!

We'll definitely have a full introduction post to the series soon™.

Thank You

Finally, we just wanted to offer a thank you again to the Chia Network team, and the overall Chia community. It's been a blast for the past year, and we're looking forward to many more. This change in direction has us back to having a ton of fun and we hope you all are too!

If you feel like supporting our projects, Donations of XCH / CATs can be sent to:
xch1dwm59nranz0khzfzmv0j9g4tpwe4fx7ven0ptr9hufs2c0kgesxq8r7mws

Ticker - CATMOS
CATegory - Gaming Token
Asset ID - ffbcf37f093d09410f17cdeb59fdaea24a544fdd5413e8eeca8fe68e917233e0
Creator / Parent Project - Catmosphere

CATMOS is currency used in events throughout the Catmosphere. The tokens are rewarded to community members who engage in the scavenger hunts, "battles", and other various events run on catmos.io. Some events reward CATMOS to participants, and others require an amount of CATMOS to be paid as as part of the event.  The project plans for CATMOS to eventually be used as "experience points" or "XP", rewarding holders with the ability to "level up" their NFT releases for a certain amount of CATMOS.  

Quicklinks:
Website | Discord | Twitter | Trade On - Offerbin.io

Project Background

The Catmosphere project is the brainchild of Josh Painter, aka enderTown, aka that guy that tweets way too much.  

This profile is going to be a little different from our previous CAT profiles... as we'll just say Josh is very... verbose. For the most part, we're just going to let him tell his story based on some questions I asked him over Discord.

Buckle up. This is a long one. I'll leave what I think are the key takeaways of the interview at the end.

How did you get into Chia?

I've been into technology since first grade when my parents bought an Apple IIe computer. I was mesmerized not just with the simple games, but wondering how someone could even make something like that. How did the button down here on the keyboard make something up there happen on the screen? My little mind kept asking questions until finally my mom bought me an Apple IIe "computer book" that she found at a book store. It was an intro to programming in BASIC and it had examples for some games. I was hooked.

Anyway, almost 30 years later I'm still fascinated by technology. The first thing that happens when I see something new and interesting is the same thing that happened back then: how does that actually work? Is it any good? What's the science or math behind it and who created it? Do they know what they are doing? Let me poke it and see if I can break it.

Chia checked all those boxes for me. I was already mining ETH just cause I had some old video cards and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A few months later I stumbled across some of  @CalebCurry's videos and was hooked.

My first farmer was an open-case disaster.

After that first one, I built a DIY JBOD setup detailed here  

And finally I have ended up with a full rack setup detailed here  

I'm farming almost 1.7PB right now but have another half PB or so that I still need to rack if only I had more time <looks accusingly at CATMOS project>.

Why did you decide to issue a CAT?

When CATs were first announced, I don't think I really even "got it." I mean yeah, different tokens, that's cool I guess, right? I couldn't have imagined how fun they are though. Once CATs were released and I started seeing all the other creativity in the community, my mind started spinning. I've had so many ideas over the years for silly little games and projects, but never an excuse to actually do any of it.

The Catmosphere was born! My thinking was "ok, now there's lots of CATs and more coming, but what can people actually DO with them right now besides trade them? That might get old after awhile." Sure, some will be turned into NFTs but even that is just a waiting game. Not fun. How could I do something with all those CATs that were just sitting in people's wallets, having no fun at all?

And then Offer Files. OH MAN. Offer Files surprised us all and we still haven't scratched the surface of what they are truly capable of. I was teasing one of the Chia devs the other day that I think if they just added a few more features for me, I could port DOOM to Offer Files. Just amazing, brilliant, simple technology.

So simple that developers in our own community still haven't realized the full potential. Catmosphere hopes to change that and throw ideas out there. Some will stick and some will undoubtably fall flat, but that's the fun and challenge of it all. Steal my ideas and make them better, if you can!

What are your plans for CATMOS & the Catmosphere?

SO MUCH. Besides an event of some sort every Sunday, I'll be working on some ongoing events that everybody can play anytime. Here's one: how about a Battle Royale game based around HODLing? Last player standing wins the pot after everybody else breaks down and withdrawals a portion of their original stake. There could be "push" deadlines where everybody who remains just gets their money back plus the pool after a certain period. Or these rounds could last for YEARS. Up to the players! This isn't just an idea - this is minted and I'm working through the logic now.

Or why couldn't an author self-publish their own book to their own website and use Offer Files as both payment and proof-of-ownership? Owners of the token could go to the author's website and upload their offer file that offers their NFT token for the book and requests 100,000 XCH. It won't be accepted of course, but it will prove that they own the token and the website will then allow them to read the book. Once they are done they can trade their NFT like anything else and let somebody else read it. Again: this is not just an idea. I've already minted the tokens for the NFTs and written a preview for the story that I plan to publish. You can find the preview pinned on my Twitter account: @endertown

As you can tell, Josh loves offer files. He also intends to use them in some pretty creative ways! I believe that a few of his ideas are much better suited for NFTs/singletons... but I have a have no doubt that he'll squeeze every bit of creative functionality out of offer files while waiting for Chia Network to finalize the NFT standard.

As an example of the type of events you can expect from the Catmosphere... This Sunday, February 13th, the site will be playing some form of "rock, paper, scissors" using offer files - Event Page. Right now, there are only instructions indicating that you'll need to submit an offer file trading at least 250 CATMOS and any amount of any other CAT in order to receive either Rock (CATRCK), Paper (CATPPR) or Scissors (CAT6OR), for use in the game. No idea what Josh is planning for this one, but we'll definitely be watching / playing ourselves.

In case you missed them, a list of all past and future Catmosphere events, their budgets, and results, can be found here.

Do you have any other successful projects that you can point to outside of Catmosphere?

Yes! When COVID hit in early 2020, I was laid off my from my job at a lending company.  One of my hobbies is 3d printing, and so after getting laid off and feeling sorry for myself for a few days, I thought "what can I do to help?" So I designed a simple face shield that used off-the-shelf components available at the time (remember all shelves were empty). With help from the community and several college students, we ended up donating thousands of these to local hospitals and clinics who sorely needed them.

Once the supply chain caught back up, we were able to pivot into selling them - especially to dentists, who loved them for some reason. We found our niche! Anyway, check it out at makers4medicine.org if you are interested or need a face shield. Demand has cooled down quite a bit, but we still have our loyal customers!

Anything else the community should know about you and your projects?

The main takeaway is that Catmosphere is here to stay. If I can figure out a way to make a living off of this and feed my family (and 2 cats) then that is what is happening. If not, I will continue to spend my free time on it. I've had such a blast working with the community and learning new stuff!

And of course we are launching our CATMOS ZERO token this coming Sunday Feb 2nd. I've already taken up enough of your time so just go here to read more: CATMOS ZERO

Thank you for the opportunity to talk more about my favorite subjects: myself and my projects! :)

Editor's Notes / Key Takeaways / Summary

For those of you still reading... (hopefully some of you). I just wanted to give my take on Josh and the Catmosphere.

Obviously, by making this post and adding Catmosphere to our curated list of CATs, we think the project is worth a little bit of your time.

Some of the reasons we like Catmosphere:

• Catmosphere is hosting new events WEEKLY. These events take creativity to design, preparation time to set up, on the fly troubleshooting, and live support. It's not a small commitment.

• Josh is active AF. I honestly don't know when the man sleeps... or sees his wife and children. He's always on Twitter engaging with the community and seems to pop up in random Discords at odd hours. I don't think he's going to disappear anytime soon.

• There's a method to the madness (kinda)... You can read a little more about Josh's plans in his "Greenomics" page published at https://catmos.io/greenomics

I highly doubt that this will be the last time we're writing a blog post about Josh and Catmosphere. Excited to see where the project goes!

Ps. If you're into NFT art, don't forget to check out the CATMOS ZERO drop here.

CATegory - Hobby Token
Asset ID - 4c7e505f68e2f00978db98a2ef01b3b0b5fef2ea92e3f72e47ef37ec528e73c9

AstroCATs is a new community of astrophotographers and astronomy enthusiasts. The project is run by Eugene Beygin, who has been producing stunning images and quality content on his website astroimaging.ca since 2016.

The 13957 AstroCat tokens minted represent the 13957 deep-sky objects identified by the RNGC/IC astronomical catalog.

Quicklinks:
Website | Discord | Twitter | Trade On - Hash.green | Offerbin.io

Creator Background

The project was created Eugene Beygin, an amateur astroimaging enthusiast who's work you can check out at astroimaging.ca.

How did you get into Chia?

I've been in the Chia space since May. It was exciting to hear about the release of the CAT1 standard and Offers functionality. I decided to create a utility token that can be used for some real-life use cases, so I applied one of my biggest passions and the project was born!

This opened the door to many interesting possibilities and every day I am discovering new ways of utilizing AstroCAT. First and foremost, AstroCAT is an astroimaging token. The astronomy community is where it can thrive to its full potential. We have distributed an initial batch of tokens to the chia community and price discovery is currently underway.

What are your plans for the token?

Short-term plans are to get a bigger adoption by the astronomy community. We will organize image competitions and space quizzes to get astrophotography enthusiasts into the chia space and vice-versa.

Future plans include support of astronomy events and partnerships with the retail and used astronomy markets.

The project is just getting started and I’m excited to see how far we can take it. I can’t forget to mention what a pleasure it is to be part of such a friendly and helpful chia community!

Anything else the Chia Community should know?

We’re beginning the pre-sale of an NFT collection geared towards astrophotographers. Messier 110 is the first major collection based on the Messier Catalog. It highlights one of the most recognizable and admired deep-space objects in our skies. The custom renditions of these popular galaxies, nebulae and star clusters will be a great collector's item in the astro community.

With public outreach a big component of the project, AstroCAT will be donating 10% of all minting fees to a charitable astronomy organization. The AstroCAT community will vote on which organization should be chosen.

They are now accepting offers in return for M110 tickets which will later be redeemable for 1 Messier NFT mint. Once the NFTs are minted, they will be randomized and the current NFT will have a sell offer created for the M110 token. Ticket holders at the top of the queue can accept the NFT or move to the back of the queue for a new selection.

After a longgggg holiday break, we're back! Today we're happy to announce we have a Chia CAT Directory joining our site over at xchcentral.com/chia-cats.

What We're Doing

Our goal with this page is to provide a curated list of notable Chia Asset Token (CAT) projects from the community. The list will ultimately encompass a variety of CATs including Stablecoins, Wrapped Coins, NFT Art Tokens, Event Tokens (Such as the Chia Holiday 2021 Token), Games, Memes, and some cool Hobby Projects!

Ideally, as we list each CAT to our site, we'll accompany it with a Blog Post profiling the CAT, and giving you additional background information on the project and the team behind it!

Cool! But why not just list all the CATs?

We think there are already some great community projects handling the "list all the CATs" workload, check out taildatabase.com and xchtoken.org to name a couple.

Additionally, we believe our curated list will provide some value for the community members who are short on time or just don't have the desire to wade through the sea of memes to find the tokens...

1. They should know about as members of the Chia Community - Stably USD & the Chia Holiday '21 would fall here.

2. The Chia Community cares about the "a lot" - Spacebucks and Marmot Coin definitely meet this criteria.

3. Interesting Projects - Space Marmots (Marmotverse), Marvelous Marmots, and AstroCAT all meet this criteria.

Wait, I'm gonna stop you there. You had me going until AstroCAT - I know and understand the other projects, but I've never heard of AstroCAT, why do they deserve to make the list?

This is where our Blog Posts at the time of listing would come into play! We don't have a full post for AstroCAT ready to go right now, but let me give you an example of the information we would include in a post to explain why we're listing.

AstroCATs is a new community of astrophotographers and astronomy enthusiasts. The project is run by Eugene Beygin, who has been producing stunning images and quality content on his website astroimaging.ca since 2016.

The 13957 AstroCat tokens minted represent the 13957 deep-sky objects identified by the RNGC/IC astronomical catalog.

Join this fun community to discuss astronomy and share photography tips. Casual astronomy fans are welcome - you will find a warm group of people to share stories with such as your best star viewing locations, northern lights experiences, and travel plans for future solar eclipses! As a member of the Discord you can also marvel at the astrophotography images images taken by the community. They're truly out of this world! Submit your self taken astrophotography image here to claim your token!

Ok, you got me, that's awesome! So, how do I get my favorite CAT listed?

Just like our pooling project, we rely on the Chia Community to tell us what projects we should be looking at! If there's a CAT we should investigate, let us know: Contact Info

We made it. One month of our site being live collecting pooling payout data collection.

Thank You

Before we get into the data, I'd like to start off with thanking the people who make this project possible:

Katie - 99.5% of the code that runs XCHcentral.com has been written by Katie. There is absolutely no way this project would have gone from idea to reality without her.

Our 5 launch day pools:
Space Pool, Flexpool.io, XCHPool, PoolChia, and True Pool. Each pool operator has been more than helpful anytime we've had a question, and they've all been very patient and understanding as we've been working out some of our initial bugs.

XCHscan.com - Thank you for your explorer and API. We love it.

Also, a special thank you to D of Space Pool, who spent a lot of time tracking down a particularly pesky API bug for us... and for not being upset when the error was actually on our end.

Now, on to the data!

Observed Netspace

During our observation period, we observed an average netspace of 34.996 EiB, with a subtle decreasing trend over the month. Bonus points if you can identify the "Dust Storm" on the graph (it's exactly where you think it is).  As a reminder, we're polling XCHscan.com once per hour for our netspace data.

Calculating Theoretical Earnings

Now we're on to the fun part... Actually benchmarking the earnings we've received against the theoretical payout amount for our farm size.

Variables used in the calculation of theoretical earnings-
Farm Netspace: 10 TiB
Average Netspace over Period: 34.99635 EiB
Farm % of Average Netspace: 0.000027%
Blocks per day: 4608
Adjusted days farming in Period¹: 28.5
Total Adjusted Blocks in Period¹: 131,328
Payout to pool on block win: 1.75 XCH

Using the above, we calculated expected theoretical earnings for the month with the following formula:

Theoretical Earnings = Farm % of Avg Netspace * Total Blocks in Period * Payout to Pool on Block Win

Theoretical Earnings for our 10TiB farms = 0.0626285994

¹ Block total adjusted for partial first day and farm downtime

Pool Performance to Theoretical

Now that we know what earnings a 10TiB  farm theoretically "should" have returned during the farming period, let's see how the pools performed in comparison.

Overall, I'm a little impressed. None of our pools had too terrible of a month! Both XCHPool and PoolChia performed ~6.8% above theoretical, while Space Pool and Flexpool performed basically at theoretical, with True Pool bringing up the rear.

I can already hear some people saying "woah, why would I ever join True Pool? They underperform!" or "Why doesn't everyone just join XCHPool or PoolChia? Clearly the best pools!!"

The fact of the matter is, none of these results are out of the ordinary given that we're only looking at one month's worth of data and a couple of the pools are on the smaller side.

To better visualize how the payments came in over time, let's check out the line graph of each timestamped hourly check-in on Unpaid + Paid Balance for each pool.

So, the chart above tells a little bit of a different story than the initial table. Each of the pools we've been tracking have been battling for the top spot at any given time, and until 2021-11-11, all pools were tracking above theoretical earnings. In fact, as of 2021-11-2, TruePool was actually the highest paying pool! Hopefully this graph has given a little more context to how quickly earnings can change for any given pool.

Takeaways

1. I don't think you can go wrong with any of the five pools we've analyzed in this post. Based on the data we have collected, each of these pools are performing within margin of theoretical earnings after the first month.

2. Just like investing, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because a pool has a good/bad week or month, doesn't mean they're going to have a good/bad time going forward.

3. We have a lot more data, analysis, and commentary to share with the community, and now we actually have a medium to deliver it! Following us on Twitter is currently the best way to keep up with when we launch new content.

Follow @XCHcentral

Support

If you like the content we're producing, and  you feel like supporting the project financially, you can send donations of XCH to: xch1dwm59nranz0khzfzmv0j9g4tpwe4fx7ven0ptr9hufs2c0kgesxq8r7mws

If you would like to support us with a private donation / sponsorship / advertising, or any other way, please reach out directly. Contact info: https://www.xchcentral.com/contact

Thank you again to the Chia team, and Chia community. We're having a ton of fun and hope you are too!

Originally posted to Reddit

Hello Chia Community!! I’m finally delivering on my overdue wayyyyy too long Reddit post updating you on what we’ve been up to at https://www.xchcentral.com/ and where we see our project going.

What we’ve been up to -

• Katie has spent a lot of time refactoring our code, which should make it easier to add new pools going forward. We’re spending a lot of time on this to try and avoid headaches months from now as we look to implement new stats.

• We added two new pools on 2021-11-06, Foxy Pool & Chiahub

• Added new stat Avg XCH/24 Hrs (Since Join) - enabling comparison between pools with different Join Dates.

Issues we’re aware of:

• Spacepool’s API occasionally kicks out errors causing us to miss collecting “unpaid balance” for a few hours at a time. Spacepool is aware of the issue and is working on a fix for us. There is no data integrity impact, just occasional slower than hourly updates. We have since fixed this issue

• Sometimes a pool will issue payout and clear out our “unpaid balance” before the payout hits our wallet, causing us to underreport for an hour or two. We’ll work on coding around this.

Where we’re going:

Near Term -

• We’ll likely roll out the Average XCH/24h stat for the following periods last 24h/7day/30day/90day.

• Sortable table to make it more apparent who’s performing where compared to the group.

• Some graphs & charts that look more fun than our current one table.

• Logos for the pools (with permission)

• More Pools. Tell us who you want to see onboarded!

Medium Term -

• A blog. I’d like to start bringing the community somewhat regular content and analysis on both our data and what's going on with the greater community. I don’t envision reporting on everything happening every day, I think blaktron @ https://thechiaplot.net/ has that covered… But I do think that we can produce some quality content based on our data and observations. Sometimes Twitter isn’t enough. Speaking of which, you should follow us - https://twitter.com/XCHcentral

Longer Term -

• Other useful tools such as a profitability calculator… power consumption… etc etc

It’s likely that our pool reporting is eventually going to introduce a tiered reporting system:

• “Basic Reporting” - will be what you see on the site right now. How much XCH hits the wallet on average. We can add these stats for any pool, regardless of how robust their API is.

• “Advanced Reporting” - For the pools that have more advanced APIs and reporting… Things like individual partial reporting, “estimated farm size” etc. This will allow us to do some more advanced calcs that allow us to break down pool performance vs our individual farm’s performance, variance, etc, etc. We’ll likely start piloting some of these calculations behind the scenes “soon” for the pools that already have the level of reporting needed.

Thank you again to the community for all of your support! We’re having a ton of fun.

- jm + katie

https://www.xchcentral.com/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/XCHcentral

Keybase - xchcentral_jm + xchcentral_katie

Originally posted to Reddit

Hello Chia community! I’m proud to announce the launch of XCHcentral.com

Over the coming weeks/months, we will be looking to build out new features and community tools.

Today we are releasing our our first project that can be found at XCHcentral.com/chia-pools

Our goal for the project is to provide live pooling results and statistics from our farm placed at several different Chia Pools.

Methodology:
For each pool, XCHcentral maintains a unique NFT with 101 k32 plots totaling ~10.0TiB. Plots for each NFT are divided across several 18TB Seagate Exos HDDs, ensuring that each drive contains some plots for each pool listed.

Every hour XCHcentral gathers statistics about our farm across the different pools via the pool operators APIs as well as utilizing xchscan.com for blockchain data.

Our goal is to be transparent, providing as much identifiable information as possible, while maintaining the security and integrity of the project. We plan to provide the payout addresses for each of our plots once we are out of the initial release and testing period.

XCHcentral aims to maintain an open dialogue with the operators of each pool and hope they will support the transparent and impartial nature of the project.

Moving forward, we will be looking to continue to onboard more pools, with a preference given to pools with a public API.

Please be patient with us regarding new features / changes to the website as we are only a two person team, jm + katie. In the coming week or two, please don’t be surprised if we have a decent amount of maintenance downtime as we consider this our “testing” phase.

Please reach out to us through email, keybase, or twitter. Contact info is listed on our site.

We look forward to hearing feedback from both pool operators and the overall Chia community!

XCHcentral.com

-jm