What Are Xaya and CHI?

Xaya is a language and blockchain agnostic platform for creating fully decentralized, permissionless, trustless, and serverless games and dapps. CHI is the native currency of the Xaya blockchain.

Xaya solves scalability issues for blockchains for both performance and computational complexity for games/dapps.

Xaya is a custom blockchain code-forked from Bitcoin and Namecoin. It uses the blockchain as a base data store similar to as is done in Namecoin. Using this base data, it ensures cryptographic security for games/dapps.

Xaya’s Game Channel technology enables numerous computationally highly complex, real-time Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) and dapps.

How Does Xaya (CHI) Work?

Xaya uses the blockchain as a base data store for cryptographic security but decouples state computation away from the blockchain using Game State Processors (GSPs).

GSPs are similar to smart contracts on Ethereum. However, since computation is decoupled, they can be arbitrarily complex.

GSPs that implement Xaya Game Channels can provide real-time trustless gameplay without bloating the core blockchain. An unlimited number of channels can run in parallel and each channel can have an unlimited amount of moves (transactions) between them without costing any fees, except those for opening and closing the channel.

Due to Xaya’s blockchain agnostic approach, GSPs can be developed and run on other platforms such as Ethereum, side chains, and others, and make use of their consensus mechanisms as well. Wrapped CHI can be used as the currency in those games.

Can You Mine CHI?

CHI can be mined using SHA-256d or a Neoscrypt variant with 25% of block rewards going to SHA-256d miners and 75% of block rewards going to Neoscrypt miners. This provides a balance of high security through SHA-256d and broad distribution through Neoscrypt.

Xaya SHA-256d is merge mined with Bitcoin (or any other SHA-256d coin) and has a significant percentage of Bitcoin’s hashing power.

Xaya’s Neoscrypt is mined with GPUs either solo or in pools.

What Is a CHI Burn?

Burning coins is when they are sent to a provably unspendable output. An example of this is in Xaya’s Taurion game where the in-game currency (cubits) can only be purchased through burning CHI.

Who Are the Founders of Xaya?

The Xaya founders are Andrew Colosimo, Daniel Kraft, Konstantin Gorskov, Sebastian de Gruiter, and Ryan Smyth.

Colosimo was a major contributor to Namecoin development in 2013. He is also the creator of the world’s first blockchain game, Huntercoin.

Kraft is a mathematician and former engineer at Google. He is the primary blockchain developer for Namecoin and Xaya. He also regularly contributes to the Bitcoin Core code on GitHub.

What Makes Xaya Unique?

Scalability is a main concern for most blockchain systems. This is amplified if complex computations and storage are required, e.g. when building complicated on-chain logic in smart-contract systems like Ethereum.

To solve scalability, Xaya implements a two-thronged approach: The basic design with game-state processors separated from the core blockchain allows to "shard off" computations for individual applications from the core network, similar to how rollups work on Ethereum (except by design much simpler and cleaner).

For even greater boosts in scalability and reducing the cost of data availability on chain, Xaya also implements Game Channels, a peer reviewed technology that allows for unlimited transactions per second while reducing blockchain bloat.

Xaya is unique in that it enables fully decentralized, trustless, permissionless, and serverless games/daps in a programming language and blockchain agnostic manner. Assets on other blockchains can easily be incorporated into a Xaya GSP.

The Xaya team pioneered the world’s first blockchain game in 2013, Huntercoin, and have extended the concept into a full platform where games take on true blockchain characteristics:

• Decentralized
• Permissionless
• Trustless
• Serverless
• Transparent
• Irreversible and immutable
• Secure
• Anonymous/pseudo-anonymous
• Limited and scarce
• Provably fair
• Fraud-proof and uncheatable

How Is the Xaya CHI Network Secured?

Xaya uses a triple-purpose mining technique that uses merge mined SHA-256d and a variant of Neoscrypt with 25% of block rewards going to SHA-256d miners and 75% of block rewards going to Xaya Neoscrypt miners.

Merged mining SHA-256d allows Bitcoin (and other SHA-256d miners) to mine CHI essentially for free. The massive hashing work done there makes CHI highly secure. If an attacker were to obtain 100% of the Neoscrypt hashing power, he would still not be able to out-do the work performed by SHA-256d miners.

Stand-alone mining with Neoscrypt facilitates broader distribution of CHI coins to the community.

Xaya’s dual algorithm mining increases its resilience against stalling.