Spacemesh Raises $3M for a Fair and Open Blockchain Infrastructure.
Developed by a team of academic researchers, the project has announced they have raised a $3 million seed round to build a new blockmesh and cryptocurrency that will be fairer and encourage greater adoption amongst home computer users.
Spacemesh, a new project from an expert team of cryptographers and entrepreneurs, looks to solve the issues of previous blockchains by building a blockmesh operating system powering a fair, distributed, secure, and highly scalable smart contracts global computer, along with a cryptocurrency in the permissionless settings. At the heart of Spacemesh is a new mathematically proven consensus protocol that replaces Proof of Work (PoW) with Proof of Space Time (PoST), and a highly incentive-compatible mesh in place of a chain.
As disk space is a homogeneous, highly underutilized and readily available decentralized resource, the Spacemesh protocol allows newcomers to join and contribute to the network via unused space on their hard drives and computing resources. Spacemesh blockchain protocols are specifically designed for running a node on a standard desktop PC, making it highly unlikely that Spacemesh-specific ASIC hardware will be developed and making it unprofitable to use cloud computing. Spacemesh protocols also eliminate the advantages of joining a virtual mining pool and make it unnecessary to pay a percentage of block awards to a central entity.
Moreover, the protocol supports a highly scalable network with thousands of transactions per second without compromising the decentralized nature of the system. This is achieved using a race-free, incentive-compatible protocol based on mesh topology. As opposed to the simpler blockchain topology, the race-freeness of the mesh guarantees that an honest validator will obtain a fair share of the rewards, regardless of the actions of other validators.
Blockmesh also enables far more frequent rewards than a blockchain, which means that pressures against decentralization are thwarted since the individual validators have no need to rely on centralized mining pools.
In the past few years, the world has witnessed a growing excitement around the possibilities that decentralization technologies hold for a merit-based, egalitarian economy. The main premise of equal access to resources, which will allow natural talent to surface regardless of socioeconomic association, holds the greatest promise of countering inequality that has been seen within decades. However, thus far, all of the deployed blockchains exhibit centralization tendencies and scalability bottlenecks as they gain popularity. Bitcoin and other Proof of Work (PoW) based systems contribute to massive energy waste, whereas Proof of Stake (PoStake) based systems require trusted checkpoints and increase the risk of divergence due to hard fork replicas.
“Spacemesh's low barrier to entry and incentive compatibility bring back the original vision of true decentralization that was started with the creation of Bitcoin,”
says Tomer Afek, Spacemesh co-founder.
“What we are building allows anyone to participate in our network, without needing security deposits, expensive dedicated hardware or anyone else’s explicit permission. We call upon all developers and cypherpunks who share our vision to join our open community and build Spacemesh together with us,”
says Aviv Eyal, Spacemesh co-founder.
The team behind Spacemesh is made up of entrepreneurs and academics, including:
- Prof. Tal Moran, faculty member, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
- Dr. Iddo Bentov, Cornell University
- Aviv Eyal, co-founder of Crackle.com (acquired by Sony)
- Tomer Afek, former co-founder of ConvertMedia, (acquired by Taboola)
- Rami Kasterstein, Managing Partner at Scale-Up Venture Capital
Roadmap to Completion
Spacemesh has begun development on the initial version of their free open source blockmesh OS. When finished, Spacemesh promises to finally deliver a blockchain solution that is immensely scalable without sacrificing decentralization. A solution that is usable in real world scenarios while providing individuals with little or no financial resources a sustainable path to participating in global commerce.
Spacemesh has set its coin distribution plan and validator awards so that the super majority of coin will be distributed via validators, to ensure fair distribution and decentralization. The project does not plan a public ICO.
