The Magic of CehhCoin

A Better Take on Scalability and Token Distribution

About a year and a half ago, the idea of CehhCoin was born. At least the Cehh part was. It took a few months of refining the concept until it evolved to become the modern CEHH we love today.

Background Story

It was around Mid-2017 when I noticed there was a major gap between users and sellers, even on platforms for tech-savvy users. In particular, Discord had no actual crypto integration despite hosting hundreds of crypto communities. Earlier that year I developed a Discord bot that was picking up popularity, so I thought that maybe I seize the opportunity and create my own DApp as a payment gateway. Thus, the first iteration of CehhCoin was born: CehhCoin was pegged to ETH. Users could send any amount of ETH to the CehhCoin contract, and it would give back that amount times a multiplier. Likewise, users could send back CehhCoin and retrieve their ETH. It worked pretty much flawlessly, and it is still active to this day on Kovan.

The problem remained: a website isn’t enough. Users aren’t willing to open a website just to send transactions. In fact, I was surprised to learn that a vast majority of Ethereum enthusiasts didn’t even have either Mist or MetaMask. While investor adoption may be rising, user adoption is appalling in comparison. Perhaps I needed to widen my audience so I could catch more users who at least knew how to send transactions.

For the second iteration of CehhCoin, I scrapped the governance contract and the pegged value. I stood adamant against doing an ICO; I wasn’t joining the tragedy of the commons and fueling the rising tensions. Instead of having a pegged value I opted to let users pay to create new CEHH, but unlike the original CehhCoin, this time users wouldn’t be able to sell it back to the contract. (This is some way of ICO’ing, but burning that ETH or donating it to specific causes is far from being a cash grab Status-style.) I thought that removing the peg and allowing speculation would at least attract curious investors who would then spread the word. But this didn’t seem to work either.

By this point, I had lost a lot of confidence in Ethereum’s adoption. Investors didn’t know what they were buying. Users didn’t actually know how to use DApps, the whole purpose of Ethereum. Developers couldn’t sell anything other than empty promises. I decided that a decentralized token that could outlive fevers and teams needed to go beyond the standard model. This is how CehhCoin became ERC891.

A Good Idea Meets Bad Timing

When the issue for ERC891 was opened, the community was quick to shot the proposal down. It was published around the time that Proof-of-Stake support was at its highest, since the January bubble had triggered a myriad of problems stemming from the low-scalability of the network. I believe that timing was the main point against the proposal, since 1 month after ERC891 was dismissed for being a wasteful Proof-of-Work hybrid, ERC918, a pure Proof-of-Work proposal was merged.

This was very demoralizing, but CehhCoin was deployed on the mainnet and was working perfectly. Regardless of competition or not, the model was performing as predicted.