The brief#
Permuto Capital turns one share of stock into two certificates, an asset certificate that carries the gains and a dividend certificate that collects the dividends. Each trades by itself, on the usual market or on Chia's blockchain. Permuto is a joint venture of Chia and an investment firm.
The investors it wanted, funds and institutions at first, had no crypto experience. They needed a way to buy, hold and redeem certificates without having to learn what a wallet is. Each pair of certificates comes from a trust that Permuto's admins set up, and those bought on the platform arrive in the investor's own vault on Chia.
The project reached us through Chia, and Saif Pasha took it end to end, from first idea to full engineering. It began with the brand. At Permuto's request he drew the logo, two half hexagons hooked together like a paper clip, which Permuto's CEO approved. Our team built the landing page next, then the platform.
The calls made first#
Before the build, Saif made the technical calls that cost most to reverse: the stack and database, and how the product would track Chia's blockchain. Three apps became two, with a single Next.js app serving both investors and Permuto's admins and a NestJS API on PostgreSQL behind it. Chia and Permuto made the business calls, including passkey-only sign-in and who verifies investors, and our team built those in. The first calls held, so Permuto's first flows landed on settled ground.
Permuto brought each flow to Saif as a rough swimlane, such as onboarding an institutional investor. He reworked it, then designed, built and stress-tested it with our team, finding the edge cases and writing the logic for each.
The hard part: an app that keeps pace with a chain#
One purchase order produced two certificates. An investor might be a person or an institution, a broker or the chain might hold a certificate, dividends needed tax withheld, and redeeming meant returning both certificates to be burned. Each step involving the chain waited on its answer. The app had to track every order's state and retry anything that failed, unseen by the investor.
Permuto's flows changed during the build. So did Chia's Cloud Wallet, the platform's foundation, as new endpoints, a new signing app and new vault types arrived. For each feature, we found the Chia engineer who built that part and learned how it was meant to work.
The platform talks to the Cloud Wallet over GraphQL, and rather than polling it, our team subscribed to its events. The server listens for a transaction settling, a phone being linked to a vault and a signature being finished, and passes each straight to the browser of the person it concerns. That moves an order on, and shows an investor a green tick once their phone is linked.
What investors and admins get#
An investor signs up with a passkey and has no password to forget.
They pick an account type, investing for themselves or for an institution. Then come an identity check and the documents to sign. To create their vault, they point Chia's signer app at a QR code and write down a recovery phrase as they go.
An order for 250 shares delivers 250 asset certificates and 250 dividend certificates. With a promo code, early investors can order before an offering opens, take a numbered place in line and earn an NFT.
Permuto's admins approve or deny purchase orders, pre-launch orders and redemptions from queues that show whether each waits on a signature, on the chain, or has settled. They set up each trust and its vault, which acts only once a set number of admins approve. They mint and send certificates, pay out dividends from an uploaded file, and manage wire details, invitations and documents without asking us.
The outcome#
Before launch, an independent security firm reviewed the app. It went live on Chia's mainnet, and investors sign up by passkey, confirm their identity and create a vault from their phone. Permuto's first offering, by invitation, went through the platform.
Permuto's later products joined the same account instead of becoming new apps, so the company keeps one platform under its own brand. An investor signs in once and switches between their products, each with its own orders and invitations.
Every journey that matters is tested end to end in Playwright before any change ships, and a new page with neither a test nor a reason to skip one fails the build. It has been under our maintenance since it shipped.
