Let’s get you started with Chia Blockchain in just a few minutes. Follow these steps and you’ll get some free Chia, do your first transaction, and even play with Chialisp, a new smart contract language.
Chia’s blockchain network is secured primarily by computer storage rather than energy, so it’s much more energy efficient than Bitcoin. And it also leads to a more decentralized node network. Its smart contract language is designed to be more auditable and have a much lower risk profile than Solidity.
Let’s go!
- Create your first wallet. Install the chia client which’ll guide you into creating first wallet at https://www.chia.net/download/
- Write down the Receive Address of your wallet, because we’re going to send it a
transaction soon. To view it, click on the “Wallets” vertical tab on the left, and look
for the Receive Address. Write it down somewhere. - Create a second Chia wallet. Close the GUI client, and then start it again. When it starts, click on “Create a new private key” to create a second wallet.
- Get some free Chia. Head to faucet.chia.net, and use the address you wrote down in step 2 to get it sent some Chia. Then do the same thing with your new second Chia wallet, using its Receive Address. You may need to reload or restart your browser if the faucet website gives you errors.
- Check your address balances on https://www.chiaexplorer.com/ This will give you some experience using the explorer and using it to poke around the blockchain records. This is also helpful because your GUI client is probably still syncing up to the blockchain, so it probably doesn’t show the amounts that you received from the faucet.
Now that we’ve made progress with simple Chia wallets and gotten some free Chia, we’ll start setting up some development tools to play around with Chialisp, Chia’s smart contract language.
- Install clvm_tools, by heading to https://github.com/Chia-Network/clvm_tools
- Try running your first Chialisp code by adding two numbers together. Try typing in this:
brun ‘(+ 1 (q . 3))’ ’39’ - Now install Atom to use as a code editor if you don’t have it already, at www.atom.io . Chialisp uses parentheses…, lots of parentheses. Using a code editor like Atom will help you avoid bugs from unclosed parentheses.
- Once your Chia client has sync’d up to the network, you can do your first Chia transaction. Note that it may take a long, long time to sync up, and the GUI client currently won’t let you send a transaction til it sync’s up. To send chia from your second wallet to your first wallet, go to the “Wallets” vertical tab in the Chia GUI client, and go to the “Create Transaction” section. In the Address / Puzzle hash section, pop in the address you wrote down in step 2. For Amount, type in 0.000000000002, and you’ll see that it says ‘2 mojos’ underneath. Mojos are the smallest unit of Chia, just like Satoshis are for Bitcoin. For “Fee”, try typing in 0, or else you could type in 0.000000000002 there if 0 doesn’t work for you. As I write this, you can get a transaction processed by the network without having to pay a transaction fee.
I hope this has helped you get started with Chia very quickly. Follow me on Twitter and sign
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Frequently-Asked Question: How many transactions per block are there in chia? Here are a couple of examples with 47 and 48 transactions in one block: https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/okk0fb/couple_of_lucky_blocks_with_40_transactions_for_a/h591oju/