Gene Hoffman, CEO of the cryptocurrency storage blockchain project and smart trading platform Chia Network, stated on Thursday (April 18) that the company has made new progress in its initial public offering (IPO), having "secretly" submitted a revised Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at the end of March.
Hoffman revealed at a conference hosted by the Brown Rudnick law firm in Manhattan that the company has not yet set a specific IPO timetable as it awaits the right market conditions.
CoinDesk reported that Chia Network disclosed in April 2023 its hopes to go public, although its IPO plans were circumvented by the financial troubles of its underwriter Credit Suisse. It was precisely the banking sector's explosive scandals that led Chia Network to lay off a third of its staff in October last year.
Chia Network was founded by Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technology. Unlike Bitcoin, which uses proof-of-work to operate its blockchain, and Ethereum, which uses proof-of-stake, Chia Network employs proofs of space and time. In simple terms, this involves the allocation of computer storage across machines around the world.
The so-called proof of space is a cryptographic technique where the prover demonstrates they have allocated unused hard drive space for storage. To be used as a consensus method, proof of space must be linked with proof of time. Proof of Time (PoT) ensures consistent timing between blocks and enhances the overall security of the blockchain.
Proof of space can be considered a way to prove that you have reserved some unused storage space on your hard drive. Users of the Chia blockchain do this by installing software that stores a set of cryptographic numbers on their disk into "plots," effectively "farming" unused space on their hard drives.
These users are known as "farmers," and when the blockchain broadcasts the challenge for the next block, farmers can scan their plots to see if they have the hash value closest to the challenge. The probability of a farmer winning a block is proportional to the percentage of the total space that the farmer occupies on the network.
Proof of time requires a brief period to pass between blocks, and is implemented through a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF), which takes a certain amount of time to compute but is very fast to verify.
The key idea of VDFs is that they require sequential computation and owning many parallel machines does not provide any benefit, thus minimizing power waste. There could be relatively few VDF servers, as the fastest server always finishes first, and the network only needs one quick and fair Timelord to complete a block and push the chain forward.
Chialisp is Chia's new smart transaction programming language, which is powerful, easy to audit, and secure. Currently available reference smart transactions include: atomic swaps, authorized payee, recoverable wallets, multisig wallets, and rate-limited wallets.
Hoffman mentioned that Chia Network plans to launch a bridge for the stablecoin issuer Circle's USDC in the coming months, along with other infrastructure projects.
It is important to emphasize that Chia Network has key differences from decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. Chia has no plans for an ICO; instead, their goal is to list the company's shares on a U.S. stock exchange.
In this way, shareholders can share risks and rewards with management in a transparent and disclosed manner, and the company can make binding statements about how it intends to use strategic reserves using easy-to-understand controls.
Chia intends to complete a fully SEC-registered equity IPO and will go public when the mainnet is launched and market conditions are favorable.
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