Spacemesh, a community of academic researchers and open source developers developing a base layer protocol for a new blockchain infrastructure, announced today a Series A investment of $15 million, led by Polychain, the world's premier investor in cryptocurrency protocols. Among the additional prominent blockchain investors this round are MetaStable, Paradigm (Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam’s new fund), Coinbase Ventures, Bain Capital, 1kx, Arrington XRP Capital, Danhua Capital, Gumi Crypto, Electric Capital, Collaborative Fund, Jack Herrick and others. They join Spacemesh seed investors: Slow Ventures, Dekrypt Capital, iAngels, BRM and Gigi Levy-Weiss.
With PoW-based systems contributing to massive energy consumption and presenting scalability bottlenecks, and PoStake-based systems exhibiting the very centralization tendencies that blockchain initially set out to replace, Spacemesh’s Proof of Space Time (PoST) protocol is generating hope throughout the community. Long-time crypto community members are particularly excited by its promise of fairness, and the elimination of unfair advantage.
“At Polychain, we are excited to explore such a breakthrough innovation in blockchain protocols - especially one that comes from a team with such a great academic pedigree. Using storage as a resource, guaranteeing distribution and efficiency, and then pairing it with their intelligent cryptographic constructions for proofs of space, Spacemesh provides us with a more secure consensus algorithm. In short, they are pioneering proof of space as a viable alternative to proof of work,”
said Karthik Raju, Partner at Polychain.
“The mining arms race and hash rate concentration have unfortunately driven us to deviate from Satoshi’s original vision of building a fair native internet economy,"
said Dovey Wan, a prominent blockchain investor, who is also joining Spacemesh’s board of directors.
"Spacemesh prioritizes community over the privileged few. This is a team of world-class researchers and developers with a belief in meritocracy at their core. I’m very thrilled to partner with them to build a fair, open and efficient Web 3.0.”
Spacemesh essentially picks up where Bitcoin left off, allowing newcomers to contribute to the security of the cryptocurrency network via a universally available and untapped resource: hard drive storage space. Fairness is achieved by ensuring that the rewards reaped by participants will be relative to the resources they supplied.
According to Spacemesh co-founder Tomer Afek,
“This is absolutely necessary, if a decentralized system wishes to gain mass adoption of home miners - and in particular, the original bitcoin miners. As many of the fairness problems result from a race and the obtaining of unfair advantage by methods such as Asic Mining, achieving consensus without using any race is an important part of how we can mathematically prove fairness, and ensure the home miner’s profit margins.”
Spacemesh’s version of PoST allows anyone who wants to participate in the p2p network to join using its existing Personal Computer by proving that it has stored some amount of data over a period of time (e.g., one week). POST becomes the foundation of trustless identity freeing nodes from having to constantly perform energy consuming computations and from bonding stake. In addition, the race between nodes to submit a block to a chain is superseded by a utilizing mesh data structure (DAG).
According to Spacemesh co-founder Aviv Eyal,
“This is what helps to make Spacemesh race-free - parties don’t race each other to extend the public ledger, but rather, every honestly mined block is accepted into the ledger. This also greatly improves the throughput and energy efficiency of Spacemesh.”
Spacemesh has no plans to raise additional funds, and will use its current proceeds to fund the development of the Spacemesh protocol and programmable cryptocurrency. Additional information about Spacemesh is available on https://spacemesh.io . The project’s milestones, specs and code are available on https://github.com/spacemeshos .
For press inquiries please reach out to us via info@spacemesh.io .
