A Letter to the Spare Community

Security and Transparency

Hey folks, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: security. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about how Spare will access your Chia plots for farming Spare. In order to farm Sparecoin on your existing Chia plots you will need to grant the app local permission using your Chia private key via “Import from Mnemonics (24 words)” . Essentially the Spare app will access your keys the same way the Chia app does. The keys used for plotting are ONLY accessed locally on your node to answer challenges and earn block rewards on your plots. That last detail is, of course, crucial. Your private key never leaves your local environment.

We realize that trust is built over time and want to actively encourage the developer community to investigate, verify and improve what we’re building. Spare is an open source project and as such we want to be fully transparent about what we’re doing. At launch, the entire codebase will be available for peer review on GitHub which will only make Spare better.

Lastly, we realize many farmers are not developers and reviewing code isn’t realistic. As a best practice we recommend you always separate your key used for plotting from your key used for rewards. This way, you can keep you wallet key with rewards completely separate, inaccessible and secure. This method ensures that the Spare app only has access to plots to use for Proof of Space and never any of your actual rewards.

If using Spare still seems too risky, even after taking precautionary measures, we welcome you to simply wait and let the community validate that the app is safe and secure! This is just the beginning and we hope Spare will have a very bright and long future ahead. Thanks and happy launch day!