This weekend I released the initial version of offerpool, an open-source, peer to peer, decentralized Chia Network offer sharing platform. I think it’s the best solution for sharing offer files, and I am happy to make it available for the Chia community.

That’s a lot of buzzwords, so I wanted to break down each one and convince you offerpool is worth your time and offer files.

  • Open-source - The source code for offerpool is up on GitHub and released under the Apache License v2. Anyone can audit the code, run their own node and evaluate offers as they are posted, or create an awesome UI for offers without being limited to only the offers uploaded to their site, all for free.
  • Peer to peer - The underlying data structure used to store offers is a eventually consistent append only OrbitDB table which anyone can write to. If an offer is added to one node it will be published to all nodes thanks to OrbitDB and the underlying IPFS swarm.
  • Decentralized - offerpool the application does not rely on offerpool.io or any centralized party to function. I could fall off the face of the earth and the network of nodes would continue to sync with each other without me.

When I first heard about offers, I had the idea that I could write a magic arbitrage algorithm that would pull together offers and create spend bundles that printed money. The big problem (besides the magic algorithm) was that I didn’t have access to all available offers. I could have scraped all the known offer sharing sites, but to build the best bundles I would have had to scrape the sites an irresponsible number of times per day, which I didn’t want to do.

I reasoned that if I was thinking about it someone else was too, and the responsible thing to do would be to built out a way to distribute offer files to everyone interested in them without having to do manual scraping or paying for an API. I did some research on distributed databases, landed on orbitdb, and got it to work. I decided to name it offerpool after the mempool, since it’s a distributed pool of offers like the mempool is a distributed pool of unconfirmed transactions.