About

Chiliz Chain (formerly called “Chiliz Chain 2.0”) is a standalone Layer-1, EVM-compatible blockchain. It uses a Proof-of-Staked-Authority (PoSA) consensus mechanism, which is a combination of Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) and Proof-of-Authority (PoA). Under the PoSA consensus mechanism, the community grants authority through staking tokens, and only the selected parties contribute to the network.

History

Alexandre Dreyfus and other members of Mediarex Group launched Chiliz and Socios.com in 2018 to enhance how teams could engage with and monetize their fanbases. To begin development, the project team raised $66.00 million in a private token sale in 2018.

In September 2018, Socios.com announced its first official partnership, a multi-year strategy with Paris Saint-Germain F.C. to launch a PSG-branded token (notably, the PSG Fan Token was later launched in January 2020).

The network’s original version is now called the Chiliz Legacy Chain (formerly Chiliz Chain 1.0), a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) blockchain integrated with the Socios.com application. It launched in November 2019 in tandem with the Socios.com app (iOS and Android) and the first-ever Socios.com Fan Token Offering (FTO) for the Juventus-branded Fan Token, JUV. Since then, Socios.com has partnered with numerous teams and leagues, including American Football, European Football (also known as Soccer), eSports, Professional Fighting, Motorsports, Tennis, and Rugby, to launch event-specific and team-specific Fan Tokens.

The full list of available Fan Tokens can be found here.

Notable milestones in the project’s history include:

• January 2020 - The ChilizX platform was announced for desktop, iOS, and Android.
• February 2022 - The project team announced plans to launch Chiliz Chain 2.0.
• January 2023 - The Spicy Testnet and Scoville Testnet are released in preparation for Chiliz Chain 2.0.
• March 2023 - Chiliz Labs, a $50.00 million incubator and accelerator program, was formed.
• March 2023 - Chiliz Labs invested and partnered with Blockasset, an athlete-verified NFT and token provider.
• May 2023 - Chiliz Chain (previously known as “Chiliz Chain 2.0”) was released. The project team also opened the bridge between Chiliz and Ethereum, allowing CHZ tokenholders to migrate from ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum to CAP-20 tokens on Chiliz and vice versa.
• June 2023 - CHZ was included in the SEC’s complaint against Coinbase as an alleged unregistered security.
• August 2023 - The project team began migrating Fan Tokens to Chiliz Chain.
• September 2023 - All Fan Tokens migrated to Chiliz Chain.
• October 2023 - The whitelist mechanism on Chiliz Chain was disabled, making the network permissionless.
• Q1 2024 - Chiliz Legacy Chain was deprecated.
• February 2024 - The details of Chiliz Chain Tokenomics 2.0 were published.
• March 2024 - The whitepaper for PEPPER, Chiliz Chain’s own meme token, was released.

The most recent development occurred on May 21, 2024, with the attempted execution of the Dragon8 hard fork. The intended features included two proposals: (i) Upgrade Staking and (ii) Deployment of Tokenomics 2.0, both of which passed governance on May 14, 2024. However, on May 23, 2024, the project team announced that only “one of the two planned hard forks was successfully implemented” and did not specify which proposal was implemented or failed. The team further stated that they “will announce the new date for the Dragon8 Hard Fork once we have completed our assessments and are confident in the revised plan.” A commercially reasonable search did not reveal specifics about the technical difficulties or an intended correction date. Once completely integrated, Chiliz Chain Tokenomics 2.0 will create the following changes:

• CHZ’s supply changes due to the implementation of an inflationary mechanism. In the first year, the rate of inflation will be 8.80%, followed by decreasing annually according to the formula seen here (up until Year 14 when the inflation rate will remain steady at 1.88% for all following years). A chart predicting the supply and inflation rate for the first 14 years can be seen here.
• EIP-1559 will be activated, which includes a fee burn mechanism that burns a portion of every network transaction fee users pay. When a user submits a transaction, a fluctuating portion of the gas fee, based on network activity (called the “base fee”), will be burned algorithmically.

Lastly, the project team intends to eventually:

• Launch the Peps NFT - “A collection of 8,888 community NFTs that can act as wallets,” to which the project team can airdrop any desired Chiliz Chain-related assets. Contemplated airdrops include meme tokens, game assets, and NFTs denoting ownership of real-world assets. This feature will launch once ERC-6551 support is added to Chiliz Chain, the intended date of which has yet to be disclosed based on a commercially reasonable search.
• Create the “PEPPER” meme token on Chiliz Chain - The project team states that "The $PEPPER coin is a digital high-five in the crypto world—a meme coin with the spirit of a chili in a fiesta, designed for chuckles, not checkbooks. Its utility in the traditional sense is as present as a snowman in the Sahara. In other words, zilch, nada, zero.” PEPPER will be airdropped to various users of Chiliz Chain and Socios.com, as well as CAP-20 CHZ tokenholders and stakers. 1.00 million PEPPER will be minted for every CHZ token in existence at the time of its launch.