There’s no doubt that Ethereum is way ahead in the NFTs scene. The famous blockchain technology not only leads by trading volume but also by high-value market. Solana closely follows its trail and now a new ‘Big boy’ steps into the scene. Chia blockchain platform has claimed to deliver in areas where the above NFTs platform fall short.
What Makes Chia Different?
The entrant blockchain platform caught the attention of many in the crypto world last year. How? By delivering a new kind of storage based alternative to blockchain security and mining. An alternative that suggested a more “green” and environmentally friendly option, compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
It is this same idea that the platform is deciding to bring to the NFT space.
Today, Chia announced the launch of its so-called NFT1 standard on main-net. This was done just weeks after rolling out the initial NFT0 standard on test-net.
Chia Network Director, President, and COO Gene Hoffman made a suggestion. He suggested that the new NFT-capable platform would be more eco-friendly than Ethereum. He also claims that it will be more stable than Solana, which has seen spurts of downtime since last fall.
“What’s been exciting is I think people are seeing this as a real opportunity to have a more green option than proof-of-work, especially as Ethereum may or may not get around to the Merge.”
Gene Hoffman
Can Chia Handle The Heat?
Ethereum’s environmental impact has been hotly debated amid the rise of the NFT market. In addition to that, the Merge that Hoffman mentioned – a shift to an energy-efficient proof-of-stake consensus model – has been on the horizon for years. It’s currently slated for August this year.
After taking aim at Ethereum’s latest upgrade, Hoffman doubled down on his criticism of Solana. He added, “We’ve seen Solana’s technical acumen of late, and that’s not been very strong.”
However, the network’s longest periods of downtime came amid overwhelming demand prompted by automated bots. This includes a peak as high as 6 million transactions per second sent to try and game an NFT mint.
With NFT support just coming online, Chia does not appear to have been tested in such an extreme manner. And for its counter-part, Solana is attempting to address its admitted stability issues.
Could Chia handle the demand of a hot NFT project mint, with or without bots trying to overwhelm the process?
Chia currently processes about 30 transactions per second (TPS), while Solana can range up into the thousands. Hoffman admitted that some kind of layer-2-scaling solution would be necessary to handle NFT mints at a faster rate than Chia’s TPS.
But he also suggested that Chia is designed for different needs than Solana, pointing to a recent Chia blog post regarding the so-called blockchain trilemma – that a blockchain can only be two of the three following things: secure, decentralized, and scalable (or able to handle a sizable amount of transactions). Chia has opted for the first two.
Plotting NFT support
An NFT is a blockchain token that serves as proof of ownership of an item, and they’re often used for digital goods like artwork, collectibles, and video game items.
The NFT market expanded to $25 billion worth of trading volume in 2021, per data from DappRadar, and that momentum carried into 2022 ahead of the recent wider crypto market decline that has impacted NFTs as well.
With the NFT1 standard, Chia Network claims that it offers improvements over Ethereum and Solana NFT functionality, such as providing what it says is a clearer picture of the provenance of an NFT via a decentralized identifier (DID), as well as enabling improved permanence of assets tied to NFTs.