Update #90 - Weeks 1 + 2 - July 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 135)

  • Tweedledee 134 died on July 26th due to an issue with the old Hare code (which has already been fixed for 0.2). We added a hotfix for the issue, cut a new release including this and some other improvements, and are in the process of launching 135.
  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to meet other smeshers, come be part of our discord server.

go-spacemesh

  • It’s been an extraordinarily busy and productive couple of weeks for our dev team. We merged 23 commits to go-spacemesh alone. The pace of development has picked up as we’ve welcomed several new team members, are putting the finishing touches on the 0.2 release milestone, and are beginning to work on 0.3.
  • Major recent changes include a rewrite of the node syncer, upgrades to the Hare mechanism, introduction of the Tortoise Beacon (a major component of 0.2), and a slew of fixes and improvements for P2P, database, ATX/Nipst handling, data structures, and tooling.
  • We found a major issue (related to how we calculate the size of the active set) on the most recent testnet (the problem killed at least one previous testnet, and possibly several). We patched it on the testnet and we’re working on a longer-term fix for 0.2.

Research

Spacemesh Dev

  • Initial dev work on initial version go-ledger-sdk is complete and waiting to be merged. This library is designed to deliver support to the Spacemesh Ledger App to golang clients such as smrepl.

SVM

  • We've got a new team member who is joining to work full-time on the SVM! This allows for more bandwidth from the SVM team and helps us get ready for 0.3.
  • Lots of code quality and safety improvements via Unroll Ergonomics, minor refactorings, and better internal documentation.
  • New features: Account Abstraction terminology changes, Fixed-Gas Integration, and Template Sections.
  • The SVM API rehaul is currently in the works, as well as SMIP discussions regarding AA & SVM Integration.

Community

  • Spacemesh co-founder and CEO Tomer Afek was a guest on the Cryptonews Podcast.
  • The Spacemesh discord now has a Polish channel.
  • Published an article, uploaded a video to youtube about Spacemesh, or made any other kind of Spacemesh-related content? Please share it with us
  • Have any ideas for Spacemesh swag? Submit them here.
  • If you’re interested in joining the Spacemesh WeChat, please contact us.

Update #89 - Weeks 3 + 4 - June 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 134)

  • Tweedledee 133 died on June 26th. 134 is in the process of being tested and should be open to the public soon.
  • For the quickest updates, please join our discord server.

go-spacemesh

  • Found and fixed a tricky memory leak in Tortoise that was causing headaches in testing.
  • Many improvements to CI tooling, metrics, and other devops infrastructure.
  • Improvements to syncer and API
  • The initial building blocks for self-healing are in place, starting with the weak coin.
  • Found, fixed, and currently testing several low-level p2p and gossip issues that were causing late messages (1, 2, 3)
  • Upgraded to golang 1.15 to take advantage of several features including better testing tools.

Research

  • Finished Account Unification SMIP, modeled on Ethereum’s EIP-2938 but with many critical changes to support the Spacemesh protocol and data structure.
  • Finished a draft Transaction Selection SMIP. We’re continuing to discuss reward mechanisms to ensure incentive compatibility and high throughput of fee paying transactions, and to minimize duplication.

Spacemesh Dev

smrepl_autocomplete

Community

  • Published an article, uploaded a video to Youtube, or made any other kind of Spacemesh-related content? Please share it with us
  • Have any ideas for Spacemesh swag? Submit them here.
  • If you’re interested in joining the Spacemesh WeChat, please contact us.

Update #88 - Weeks 1 + 2 - June 2021

Spacemesh Jobs

  • Spacemesh is looking for a strong Electron developer to work on the Smapp (Spacemesh App frontend) for a fully remote/WFH position. Full details here

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 132)

  • Tweedledee 132 died on June 16th. We’re in the process of launching the next iteration.
  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to meet other smeshers, come be part of our discord server.
  • We’ve added a new FAQ section to our Testnet Guide.

go-spacemesh

  • We made some improvements to Hare, such as adding support for verifying the empty set (empty layers).
  • We found and fixed a memory leak in Tortoise, and fixed some low level networking issues as part of ongoing testnet work.

Research

  • We have a new SMIP on Account Unification, our candidate account model. It’s based on the Account Abstraction design from Ethereum, with modifications to support the mesh data structure.
  • We’re working on a “unified block” design that overcomes many of the challenges associated with the coordination problem of transaction selection in a mesh. It adds a step to the existing consensus process whereby participating nodes agree on not just a set of blocks and transactions to include in each layer, but also, how to order and aggregate those transactions into a single “superblock” per layer.

SVM

Spacemesh Dev

  • New gpu-post release for Spacemesh 0.2 with bug fixes, improved CI, and miscellaneous lib usability improvements.
  • New draft specs for integrating gpu-post lib with go spacemesh.
  • New draft proposal for Spacemesh API changes for release 0.3 related to Spacemesh Apps.

Community

Update #87 - Weeks 3 + 4 - May 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 131)

go-spacemesh

  • We merged one of the biggest, most important updates that’s been in the works for a long time: variable-size PoST (#2039. This will allow users to commit a variable amount of storage space on future networks, rather than a single fixed amount of space.

Product

  • We published a new blog post about upcoming Smapp features.
  • Work started on additional API specs for Spacemesh 0.2 and Spacemesh 0.3. Please take a look and add your thoughts and ideas!

GPU-POST Library

CLIWallet

  • We want to find a new name for this app and we are open to suggestions from the community. Add your suggestion here!
  • Fixed crash on app startup on Windows.

Research

  • We finalized our economics plan, and will be announcing it publicly in the near future.

SVM

Spacemesh Dev

  • Spacemesh is looking for a strong Electron developer to work on the Smapp (Spacemesh App frontend) for a fully remote/WFH position. Full details here.

Community

  • The Spacemesh discord server has reached 7573 members! 2500 new members in two weeks!
  • Published an article? uploaded a video to youtube? Please share it with us!
  • Have any ideas for Spacemesh swag? Submit them here.
  • If you’re interested in joining the Spacemesh WeChat, please contact us.
  • Contact Chaim if you’d like to volunteer and launch the Italian or German local community.
  • Spacemesh added many new community leaders, including @hernejj, @guri for the Korean community, @DaniFornons for the Spanish community, and @andreiv for the Romanian community.
  • We now have dedicated channels on our discord server for Spanish, Italian, and Romanian smeshers!

Update #86 - Weeks 1 + 2 - May 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 129)

  • Tweedledee 128 died on May 2 and was resurrected on May 4. We have already surpassed 1400 individual nodes!
  • A new release of the Spacemesh app is available.
  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to meet other smeshers, come be part of our discord server. Please continue to share bug reports and logs!

go-spacemesh

  • We merged a major upgrade to our sync code, a big milestone.
  • We’re continuing to explore new and better options for infrastructure including logging, telemetry, and profiling.
  • We’ve made good progress on identifying and addressing some low-level issues that have caused late messages on recent testnets, through better logging and profiling.
  • We replaced BLS with ED, resulting in much more efficient signatures.

Product

Proof of Space Setup Components

  • The implementation of phase II algorithm in the core library is close to code complete and is in testing.
  • Removed the requirement to install the Vulkan Compute SDK for Spacemesh 0.2 smeshers in systems with Vulkan-enabled GPUs such as Apple M1, AMD and Intel GPUs.
  • We updated tests to the phase II algorithm and added a full integration test of the core pos setup flow.
  • We updated the pos-server to use the phase II algorithm and added a full integration test of the core use case. See release v0.1.1.

Research

  • The research team continues to make progress on finalizing the Spacemesh protocol paper, and on exploring novel ideas to improve block production and transaction selection.
  • In parallel, we are also in the process of finalizing our economic model, and will be announcing this soon.

SVM

Spacemesh Dev

  • There are two open positions in Team Spacemesh! We’re looking for a strong core developer and a strong Rust developer to join our dev team from anywhere in the world. We also offer a $5K USD referral bonus for both of these positions.

Community

  • The Spacemesh discord server has reached 4906 members!
  • If you’re interested in joining the Spacemesh WeChat, contact us here.
  • Contact us if you’d like to volunteer and launch the Spanish local community.
  • We’ve welcomed four new community leaders! From Thailand: @winditus and @nptytn. From India: @jenni and @KingSuper.

Update #85 - Weeks 3 + 4 - April 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 128)

  • Tweedledee has now reached over 1500 individual nodes.
  • We released a new build of the app with a patch for a common issue where syncing got stuck at base layer 575.
  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to meet other smeshers, come be part of our discord server. Please continue to share bug reports and logs!

go-spacemesh

  • We’ve merged a number of important updates over the past few days, including fixes that were tested thoroughly in the testnet: we fixed a couple of memory leaks and a couple of sync issues.
  • We’ve continued to test and improve the new verifying Tortoise code.
  • We continue to make rapid progress on the final features for the 0.2 release including variable PoST, new sync, and self-healing.

Research

Spacemesh Dev

  • There are two open positions in Team Spacemesh! We’re looking for a strong core developer and a strong Rust developer to join our dev team from anywhere in the world. We also offer a $5K USD referral bonus for both of these positions.

Community

  • The Spacemesh discord server has reached 4378 members!
  • If you’re interested in joining the Spacemesh WeChat, contact us here.
  • Contact us if you’d like to volunteer and launch the Spanish local community.

Update #84 - Weeks 1 + 2 - April 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 126)

  • Tweedledee 128 was launched on April 4th, and has now reached over 1200 individual nodes. We’re excited to report that this is our most stable testnet to date, and many of the issues reported in previous testnets have been addressed.
  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to meet other smeshers, come be part of our discord server. Please continue to share bug reports and logs!

go-spacemesh

  • Verifying Tortoise, a complete rewrite of the Tortoise consensus algorithm to be much more efficient, is complete, tested, and has been merged.
  • We’re putting finishing touches on the other major protocol updates to be included in the 0.2 release, including new sync and variable post.

SVM

  • Implemented the Fixed-Gas (SVM SDK emits Wasm restricted code as explained in the PR description).
  • The next steps will be adding validations of restricted Wasm programs and calculations of gas-units for a transaction.

Research

  • We’re continuing to make progress on an efficient, incentive compatible “distributed knapsack” transaction selection algorithm.
  • We’ve nearly finalized the design of self-healing, one of the final parts of the core Spacemesh consensus protocol to be put in place. We expect to begin development work this week.

Spacemesh Dev

  • There’s a new open position in Team Spacemesh! We’re looking for a strong core developer to join our dev team from anywhere in the world. We also offer a $5K USD referral bonus for this position.

Community

  • The Spacemesh discord server has reached 4116 members!
  • If you’re interested in joining the Spacemesh WeChat, contact us at info@spacemesh.io.
  • Spacemesh community member @winditus launched a Thai Spacemesh group on Telegram.
  • We’re launching a new community website, and want to hear from you, our community, about what makes you think blockchain matters, and how Spacemesh fits into this vision. Learn more here.
  • Contact us if you’d like to volunteer and launch the Spanish local community.

Update #83 - Weeks 3 + 4 - March 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 126)

  • Tweedledee 126 died on March 30th, after reaching an all-time high of over 1000 active smeshers. Our team is investigating the cause, and will provide a postmortem soon. A new network, including better logging and many fixes, will be up within a few days.
  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to meet other smeshers, come be part of our discord server.

go-spacemesh

  • As part of the ongoing effort to investigate and respond to testnet issues, we’ve made great progress fixing issues that have arisen in the P2P (networking) stack, the Hare consensus mechanism, and elsewhere. Users should start to see the impact in terms of better UX starting with the next testnet.
  • We’ve added a new, more sophisticated type of logging, contextual logging, that adds a great deal of context to our logs and allows us to trace the path of an individual message or piece of data up and down the stack. This has already greatly facilitated debugging of the most complex issues (including the ones described in the previous bullet point).
  • We have an action plan for a much more sophisticated metrics collection and telemetry framework
  • We continue to make good progress on long-term, large-scale projects on the critical path to our next milestone, and mainnet, such as rewritten sync, verifying tortoise, and variable post

Spacemesh Dev

  • There’s a new open position in Team Spacemesh! We’re looking for a strong core developer to join our dev team from anywhere in the world. We also offer a $5K USD referral bonus for this position.

Community

  • The Spacemesh discord server has reached 3435 members!
  • If you’re interested in joining the Spacemesh WeChat, contact us at info@spacemesh.io.
  • We now have Turkish Spacemesh group on Telegram.(Thanks to @Elturco for getting things off the ground, and helping the Turkish community members!)
  • Our discord server now has channels for Korean and Turkish users!
  • We’d like to extend a warm welcome to the Spacemesh family to our new community managers, including Elf (Chinese community), elturco (Turkish community), Nodes.Guru (Russian community), and KY (Korean community).
  • Multiple of these communities have already taken the lead in translating Spacemesh documentation into languages including Russian (Spacemesh setup) and Turkish (Introduction to Spacemesh and How will Spacemesh work in real life?).

Update #82 - Weeks 1 + 2 - March 2021

dashboard_700plus

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 126)

  • We’ve reached a record of over 600 active home smeshers!
  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to meet other smeshers, come be part of our discord server.
  • We introduced friendly short urls for Spacemesh testnet dashboard and explorer so they are easier to type, remember, and share.

Spacemesh Dev

  • New open position in team spacemesh! We’re looking for a strong core developer to join our dev team from anywhere in the world. We also offer a $5K USD referral bonus for this position.

Product

  • We launched a new platform documentation site which currently includes the Spacemesh protocol docs. Docs are now fully searchable and versioned.

Community

  • The Spacemesh discord server has reached 2,674 members, up over 1000 members since our last update!
  • Our Chinese WeChat community is also thriving. If you’re interested in joining, contact us at info@spacemesh.io.
  • We now have Russian Spacemesh group on Telegram with 200+ members. (Thanks to nodes.guru for initiating the channel and helping the Russian community members!)
  • A huge thank you to @cyberomanov, from our Discord community, for writing an article in Russian about joining the testnet.
  • Our discord server now has a channel dedicated to discussing hardware and mining rigs.

Update #81 - Weeks 3 + 4 - February 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 126)

  • We launched Tweeldedee 126 on March 5th, with a host of fixes and improvements. For users outside of China, join us here! For those in China, join us here.
  • Check out the Dashboard and Explorer.
  • We released a postmortem for Tweedledee 124, giving a thorough breakdown of what went wrong and what we learned from it.
  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to meet other smeshers, come be part of our discord server.

Research

  • We concluded preliminary research into economic models for coin issuance, and we’re discussing what our issuance/inflation function will look like. We’ll provide more information on this soon.
  • We discussed the consensus failures that occurred on the most recent testnets and proposed several tweaks to both parameters and logic to avoid these failures in future, such as reducing the maximum number of Hare iterations per layer, and making the Tortoise consensus process less reliant on Hare (for purposes of the testnet).
  • We’re continuing to study the design of account abstraction as implemented by other networks, and its suitability for Spacemesh, as part of finalizing our account and transaction model.
  • The team has been hard at work on their submission for the Crypto 2021 conference later this year.

SVM

Community

Update #80 - Weeks 1 + 2 - February 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 124)

dash_124

Spacemesh Core Dev

dev_124

dev2-124

  • We released a new localnet for developers. You can easily set up a local Spacemesh network on your dev box with locally-built Spacemesh software components or with released components on docker hub. Browse and search logs with Kibana, execute transactions with a CLIWallet, set up smeshing, and much more…
  • Launch a full Spacemesh network with 10 smeshers, on your computer with 2 lines of code:
    npm install -g spacemesh-local-testnet
    spacemesh-local-testnet create

Research

  • We’re finalizing the design of our account and transaction model. We’re researching the work that Ethereum and other communities have done on account abstraction (unifying multiple account and transaction types into a single model) and evaluating its suitability for Spacemesh.
  • While the Spacemesh topology makes it harder to calculate and compare a single state root per layer (relative to a chain topography), we’re researching ways to do just this to immediately detect bugs that lead to state forks.
  • We’ve made good progress on economic research, including an analysis of Filecoin economics and issuance model and its applicability to Spacemesh. We’ll announce a candidate economic and issuance plan soon.
  • Research continues on an efficient algorithm for transaction selection, which is an especially difficult problem in Spacemesh due to the fact that it’s a distributed knapsack problem.
  • We’ve put a lot of thought into streamlining our R&D pipeline to remove obstacles and ensure that we’re on the shortest possible path to genesis. We set up a new project board that can be used to track the pipeline.

Community

Update #79 - Weeks 3 + 4 - January 2021

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 123)

  • Tweedledee, the Spacemesh open testnet, is currently down, but our team is investigating the issue and already has a new candidate for the next iteration. This version will have fixes, some new features, and will be able to use both the old and new versions of the Spacemesh API.
  • For ongoing updates, or if you have any questions, please join our Discord server.

Join Team Spacemesh!

Research

  • We decided to drop BLS signatures in favor of ED25519, for reasons of efficiency. We’re also working on using a single pubkey for both VRF and NodeID signing.
  • We finalized our design for transaction signing, with future-proof support for pruning redundant transaction data later. This will allow us to move ahead with hardware wallet support.
  • We decided to support both standard ED25519 (which does not support pubkey extraction) and our ED25519++ design (which does) in the node, although only standard ED25519 transactions will be supported in Smapp at genesis. The former will result in larger, slightly more expensive transactions, while transactions using the latter will be slightly cheaper as they do not need to explicitly include the sender pubkey.
  • We’re finalizing our design for a NetworkID (unchanging post-genesis) and a ProtocolID (changes with every protocol update) for cross-network replay protection
  • We’re exploring a simpler, stateless multisig design and considering including multisig as a “first class” transaction type

SVM

Spacemesh App

  • We are working on migrating the app to work with the new Spacemesh API.

Community

  • Our Discord server has reached 1316 members!

Update #78 - Weeks 1 + 2 - January 2021

dash-2

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee (Net 123)

  • Tweedledee, the Spacemesh open testnet, is back in business! Our team has added additional logs to give greater insight into future problems. Join now!
  • Join our Discord server for the fastest updates. Our team is on hand to answer any of your questions!
  • The Dashboard and Explorer are both live on the new testnet.

Join Team Spacemesh!

go-spacemesh

  • A couple of unstable tests were fixed so our pull requests can be tested and merged again.
  • Following this work, several small bug fixes and improvements that were stuck in the pipeline were merged.
  • We’ve resumed the work to merge a few large changes that are in the pipeline: improved sync, verifying tortoise, and variable size post.
  • Work has begun on the new transaction processing flow that also supports smart contracts for the first time!
  • We’re in the process of upgrading our system tests infrastructure to use our slick new GRPC API. We’re also adding database indices to make API lookups faster.

Product

Research

  • Work continues on finalizing the Spacemesh economic and incentives model for genesis. We’re evaluating several novel economic models and studying the models adopted by other projects.
  • In parallel, we’re also working on finalizing transaction processing and selection. Transaction selection is much trickier in the mesh topology than in a chain since, rather than a single miner constructing a single block, there are many smeshers and many blocks per layer, hence it’s a distributed knapsack problem. We’re evaluating a promising new proposal that cleverly avoids many of the challenges we face around transaction selection and ordering.

SVM

Spacemesh App

  • We are working on the following major updates to the app: use only the new Spacemesh API, support the new 0.2 transaction format, and include many user interface improvements and additional new features such as vaults and a new new user experience flow.

Spacemesh Web Services

  • We finished implementing full automation for deployment web services to a Spacemesh network using github actions and we have deployed the services to the new TweedleDee 123 testnet as well as a testnet statuspage https://status.spacemesh.io

Community

  • Our Discord server has reached 1154 members!

Update #77 - Weeks 1 + 2 - December 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • Over the weekend, open testnet 122 experienced an issue that caused layer verification to fail. We are investigating the issue and will launch an updated testnet as soon as we have verified a fix.

Join Team Spacemesh!

  • We are looking to extend our core dev team with a few exceptional people. All positions are fully remote, so anyone with the requisite skills and experience may apply.
  • We’re looking for experienced Go developers to join our core dev team.
  • We’re also looking for a Principal Software developer to analyze and improve the Spacemesh protocol and its implementation.

go-spacemesh

Research

  • We finished a series of SMIPs specifying the software and protocol update process: for go-spacemesh, the protocol, Smapp, and code signing.
  • Preliminary research on transaction structure and processing is finished and implementation work will begin shortly. Innovations in this design include multiple transaction types (including a “batch” transaction type), a new nonce scheme better suited to a mesh (than a blockchain), and transaction pruning. See SMIP-37 for more.
  • Similarly, preliminary research on incentive design and rewards is finished and implementation work will begin shortly. We’ve settled on a design based on EIP-1559 (which has very good game theoretic properties and has already been implemented in major blockchains including Celo, Filecoin, and NEAR) that’s modified to better suit our mesh topology. Innovations in this design include how to pick a base fee per layer, pooling of fees and rewards, and reward maturation. See SMIP-38 for more.
  • Research is ongoing into how to allow unnecessary data to be pruned from the mesh using a strategy called dangling pointers, and into how to design a separate role in the protocol for validators (as opposed to miners). More on these topics soon.

SVM

Smapp

  • We have implemented most screens related to variable gpu-generated proof of space in preparation for the API support needed to complete this new major feature.
  • We implemented many new screens and features as well as updates to existing features.

Dashboard and Explorer

  • We fixed many issues we discovered on the open testnet explorer, and we finalized the first alpha release of both explorer and dashboard for the testnet.
  • We are working on a supported deployment of dashboard and explore for upcoming Testnet releases. Both dash and explore will be launched with the upcoming open testnet release.

CLIWallet

Spacemesh API

  • We added smesherId and atx to block data structure to improve the information displayed in a Spacemesh explorer.
  • We implemented a supported secure public API endpoint for Spacemesh testnets. it will be launched with the upcoming testnet release.

Community

Update #76 - Weeks 3 + 4 - November 2020

cli_wallet

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • Tweedledee testnet (network ID 122) has been up and running for 12 days. We keep improving with the help of our community. It currently has 60 community smeshers.
  • Have a look at the current network on our alpha dashboard.
  • To join the Testnet, download the latest version of the Spacemesh App, and join us on discord where we can answer any of your questions.

Join Team Spacemesh!

  • We are looking to extend our core dev team with exceptional people. Work from anywhere on stuff that matters!
  • We’re looking for experienced Go developers to join our core dev team. Candidates can be based anywhere as the position is fully remote.
  • We’re also looking for a Principal Software developer to deeply analyze and help improve the Spacemesh protocol and its implementation. This role is also fully remote.

go-spacemesh

  • We finished the process of upgrading the API and removed a lot of old code in the process, vastly simplifying the build process.

SVM

Dashboard and Explorer

spacemesh_explorer
spacemesh_dashboard

  • We had good progress on making the explorer and dash more accurate, useful, and easier to use by doing more interactive tests and by fixing various issues
  • Explore Tweedledee open testnet data on our alpha network explorer.

CLIWallet

  • We completed a major update to the Spacemesh reference CLI wallet. It now works using the new and robust Spacemesh API. Many new commands and features were added. The wallet is designed to work with a go-spacemesh full node for users who want to join the Testnet without using Smapp.

Community

Update #75 - Weeks 1 + 2 - November 2020

stanford_event_sm

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • Tweedledee died on Friday, November 6 and has just been resurrected. You can download the latest Spacemesh App and join the latest testnet (network ID 120) here. A postmortem is available. Tweedledee should now also run fine on MacOS Big Sur.

Spacemesh Dev

  • We’re looking for Strong Go developers to join our team from anywhere full time.
  • It’s been a busy couple of weeks for our developers. We’ve merged 13 pull requests in our flagship go-spacemesh node implementation, including bug fixes, improvements to our logging, API, and CI infrastructure, and improvements to the sync protocol.
  • We have added comprehensive unit and integration tests to the gpu-lib project to make the library more robust and verified we can support OS 11 (Big Sur) and have been testing the library on various popular OSes and GPUs (Windows, Linux, OS X, AMD, Nvidia and Intel Gpus)

Smapp

Dashboard and Explorer

  • We’ve been busy getting these two apps ready for the new open testnet release by fixing bugs and migrating the backend to use API changes and updates. See the Spacemesh Dashboard and the Spacemesh Explorer.

Community

  • What’s decentralization got to do with it? Tomer Afek posted the second installment of his blog series "How to Save Humanity": Our Universe Has Always Been Decentralized
  • Lane Rettig posted the ninth installment in his “Better Blockchain” series, on a subject we’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently, Production Readiness. He also published a piece comparing blockchain and religion.
  • The Stanford Blockchain Club hosted an introduction to Spacemesh, with Tomer Afek and Noam Nelke presenting. A huge thank you to all who attended! You can watch the presentations here.
  • Our discord server has 969 members!

Update #74 - Weeks 3 + 4 - October 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • Tweedledee died on October 17th, and was resurrected on October 23rd. We are now on netid 119. See our postmortem for a technical rundown of what happened.
  • Tweedledee has 57 community nodes.

Spacemesh Dev

SVM

Community

Update #73 - Weeks 1 + 2 - October 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • Tweedledee has 80 community smeshers.
  • The current network has been running smoothly since the 16th of September.

Spacemesh Dev

Community

Update #72 - Weeks 3 + 4 - September 2020

dashboard_dark

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

Spacemesh Dev

explorer_dark

Spacemesh Product

SVM and Vaults

Community

Update #71 - Week 1 + 2 - September 2020

smeshing_dark

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • The testnet (netid 117) went down on the 15th of September, and our team worked hard to resurrect it. Netid 118 is now up and running! A post-mortem will be coming soon.
  • We would like to thank our Chinese community for being the first to notice that something was wrong!

Spacemesh App

  • We released a new build of the Spacemesh Application. Downloads and release notes can be found here.

Spacemesh Dev

Spacemesh Product

Community

  • Lane Rettig published the next installment of his ongoing blog series, looking at how to build a better blockchain through the lens of economics.
  • Our discord server has reached 825 members! Come join us today.

Update #70 - Week 3 + 4 - August 2020

gumi_screenshot

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • Tweedledee (network 116) died at around 17:00 UTC on August 24th due to the interaction of a previously unknown bug and PoET nodes that ran out of disk space, and was reborn on August 26th. See the postmortem for a full analysis of what went wrong, and what we’re doing to prevent a similar incident in the future.
  • Tweedledee (network 117) has 23 non-managed nodes.

Spacemesh Dev

installing

Spacemesh App

  • Implementation of the new user variable post with GPU is in progress. See visual designs here.
  • New working with wallets user journey mini spec to be implemented for upcoming open testnets and mainnet.

SVM and Vaults

Community

  • Gumi Cryptos hosted a digital meetup for the Japanese Spacemesh community on August 27th. Lane Rettig and Tomer Afek presented on behalf of Spacemesh, and participated in a panel Q&A with Mai Fujimoto, better known as Miss Bitcoin, Yoriko Beal of HashHub, and Andy Duan of HashKey DX. They discussed the Spacemesh mission, protocol, and economics. Many thanks to the Gumi Crytpos team for organizing this successful event! A full recording is available here.
  • Our Discord now has three new channels for Russian, Japanese, and Chinese speakers. Come join us today!
  • Have any questions you feel are missing in our current FAQ? Submit them here.
  • Aviv Eyal published a blog post with infographics to introduce newbies to Spacemesh.

Update #69 - Week 1 + 2 - August 2020

smapp

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • Tweedledee has passed its 20,000 layer birthday! Long live Tweedledee!
  • We have 30 active community nodes.

Spacemesh Dev

Spacemesh App

Community

  • Have any questions to ask about Spacemesh? Do you feel like there are holes in our existing guides and FAQ? Give us a hand by filling out this very short form.
  • Lane Rettig published a new blog piece about how crypto needs a just cause in order to thrive.
  • Gumi is hosting an online meetup for our Japanese community on Thursday, August 27th. More details coming soon!

Update #68 - Week 3 + 4 - July 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • This is the longest-running iteration of Tweedledee to date! The testnet has been running as expected for 56 days since genesis. We hope to see it stable and functional for at least several more months. It’s not too late to join!

Spacemesh Dev

  • We’d like to thank stuartkuentzel for his work on Spacemesh logging system.
  • The core team is working hard on implementing the full Spacemesh protocol in go-spacemesh and has made good progress on implementing several smips.
  • We had good progress on integrating our new variable-size proof of space generation using a GPU library into go-spacemesh.
  • We have a first working implementation of the new and improved Spacemesh API in go-spacemesh and we have set up a devnet with nodes which provide the new api services for testing. The new API provides several robust services for clients such as wallets, explorers, and backup agents.
  • We are completing work on the Spacemesh dashboard using mocked data and we are about to connect it to the devnet and the new api services as data sources.
  • We are finishing up the first version of the Spacemesh Ledger App and SDK and getting ready to submit it to Ledger for inclusion in Ledger Live.
  • We keep hiring awesome senior go devs worldwide to work on Spacemesh and we are looking for one more developer to join the core dev team. Review the position here.
  • We have completed the specifications of Spacemesh transactions types and binary format. Main addition is support for SVM transactions and ledger wallet signing.

Spacemesh App

SVM and Vaults

Community

Update #67 - Week 1 + 2 - July 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • We’ve reached a new record! Tweedledee is still going strong since the last genesis and has reached layer 11695! That’s 40 days of the network running, with 5 minutes per layer.
  • We have at least 55 community nodes online on the testnet.

Spacemesh Dev

Spacemesh App

  • We have a new release of the Spacemesh App with dark mode, in addition to several improvements and bug fixes.
  • We started to work on transitioning the app to use the upcoming new Spacemesh API.

Spacemesh Research

  • The Spacemesh Research team is focused on completing the academic paper of the updated Spacemesh protocol, as well as completing a self-healing protocol to recover the Spacemesh network in the event of an attack or network split. The team is also formulating an updated rewards scheme for smeshers who participate in the protocol and submit blocks to the network.

SVM and Smart Wallet

Community

Update #66 - Week 3 + 4 - June 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

smesher-1

  • We had another release of the Spacemesh application, this time with new features including contacts and wallet commands. Details and release notes can be found here.
  • We added guides for the new contacts feature, new wallet commands, and sign text.
  • We’ve reached layer 7220.
  • We have 49 non-managed nodes smeshing, participating in the protocol and getting rewards.

Spacemesh Dev

  • We have launched a new mini product site with info about the Spacemesh project roadmap, spacemesh coin units, visual designs, some additional specs and more.
  • Thank you Mark Tyneway for contributing a nice script for parsing full node log files to extract home smeshers rewards data. A Spacemesh Kudo is on its way to you.

Community

Update #65 - Week 1 + 2 - June 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

smesher

  • Tweedledee died on June 4th due to issues with our managed nodes. But, thanks to the hard work of our team, it was resurrected on June 8th (new network id: 116). Long live Tweedledee!
  • Along with the testnet reboot, we took the opportunity release a new version of the Spacemesh app.
  • The latest testnet has reached layer 3131.
  • We have 100 managed nodes and 25 community nodes.

Spacemesh Dev

  • Work continues apace on a more robust Spacemesh API. The new API will make it much easier to extract full node data for use in the Spacemesh app, as well as the in-development explorer and dashboard.
  • We are looking for a core Go developer who can work remotely to join our team!
  • We have so many amazing open source contributors to our project! We would like to thank:
    jsign for fixing some race conditions in tests
    Kulak for refactoring some utility functions to use consistent naming
    howy1993 for his multiple contributions to the SMApp
    DaveAppleton for his continued work on the testnet block explorer
    Sergey for his continued work on the testnet
    Sudachen for fixing local-testnet issues, and adding features to the CLI-wallet.

Spacemesh Design

Community

  • Our discord server now has 585 members!

Update #64 - Week 3 + 4 - May 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

tweedledee_first_person

  • A new genesis! We moved our managed nodes to a new more efficient infrastructure and started a new network (id 115). We had 50 home smeshers join the new network in less than 24 hours from launch!
  • We’ve reached layer 2000 and have 100 managed nodes and 50 non-managed nodes.
  • We released a new version of the Spacemesh app: 0.0.12. It features many many bug fixes and improvements. See its release notes and download links .
  • We updated the instructions on joining the new network by building a cli full node and a cli wallet from source code. This is a way for users to join the testnet without using the Spacemesh application.

Spacemesh Dev

  • The core dev team keeps progressing on implementing consensus protocol changes and updates for future testnet releases prior to mainnet genesis.
  • We are looking for a core Go developer to join our team! It’s a 100% remote/WFH position. More details here.
  • We posted new technical docs on the Spacemesh Sync protocol
  • We posted a new Spacemesh protocol deep dive.

Community

  • Have you been participating in the testnet? Let us show you our appreciation!
  • We added the last of our testnet tutorial videos. Check out the entire video series.
  • Lane Rettig published a new blog post called The Cult of Ownership that explores the concept of ownership and how we might rethink it in the blockchain era.
  • On the 27th, we had a Testnet Genesis Party featuring DJ Fuzzy Logic!
  • Our discord server has reached 490 members! At our last update, it had 408.

Update #63 - Week 1 + 2 - May 2020

screen_shot_2020-05-17_at_2.50.29_pm

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • It’s been 22 days since the genesis of ne-tid 114, and we’ve reached layer 6,843. In addition to our internal smeshers, 36 additional smesher p2p full nodes have joined the network.
  • We released a new build of the Spacemesh app that fixed a major bug. See the download links and release notes.
  • We posted several more installments of our testnet video tutorials. If you’ve been thinking about downloading the Spacemesh App and joining the testnet, this video series is a great place to start!
  • Our results from the Tweedledee survey are in! The common testnet user is a 40-year-old American man with a passion for crypto and a desire to smesh on his home computer. For more details, you can download the full PDF.
    multiple_smeshers_one_machine

Spacemesh Dev

  • The core dev team is focused on implementing the big consensus protocol changes and getting them ready for a testnet release.
  • We are looking for additional Go developers to join the core dev team - 100% wfh.

Spacemesh SVM and Smart Wallets

Spacemesh Community

  • Lane Rettig did interviews with MetaRadio and Blockchain UniVRse (the latter in VR!).
  • Lane Rettig also published a blog post about the problems with many blockchain grants programs (hint: they’re not permissionless!), and some ideas on how to improve them.
  • Our Discord server has reached 408 members! We’d love for you to become one of them!
  • Our Twitter has reached 1,734 followers.
  • Lane Rettig and Aviv Eyal, resident Spacemesh DJ, hosted a “solarpunk” VR dance party over the weekend in a custom-designed VR space! Participants joined from as far afield as San Francisco, Sydney, Beijing, and Berlin. The event celebrated the end of (virtual) New York blockchain week and last week’s Bitcoin halvening.
    vr_part_1

Update #62 - Week 3 + 4 - April 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

zoom_bcg_testnet

  • We released version 0.0.7 of the Spacemesh App with bug fixes and stability improvements. Release notes here.
  • The Tweedledee network (net id 113) went down on April 23rd, but, with the relentless work of our team, it was back up and running by April 25th (net id 114). Here’s the post-mortem.
  • We published two hands-on video guides on how to build Spacemesh from source code and join the testnet from the terminal. Watch the playlist.
  • Our discord community is growing. It now has 372 members! That’s 44 new members since our last update.
  • We conducted a small anonymous survey to better understand who’s interested in Spacemesh and has joined the testnet. Results will be out soon!
  • We had two exciting community code contributions, a basic mesh explorer and a tool to decrypt and convert wallet. Thank you @Dave Appleton!
    explorer1

explorer2

explorer3

Spacemesh Development

  • The core dev team is focused on implementing key protocol changes required for the major dev milestone, Spacemesh 0.2.
  • We started work on a more robust API to the mesh and the Spacemesh full node.
  • We are looking for additional Go developers to join the core dev team - 100% wfh.
  • We’ve implemented and released a dark mode feature for both the protocol docs site and the testnet guide
  • Work has started on the Spacemesh app 0.0.8 - the next minor release of the Spacemesh app for the Testnet. Expect many UI improvements, wallet file format enhancements, and more. For more info head to the smapp board

Spacemesh Community

Update #61 - Week 1 + 2 - April 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

Node_screenshot

  • Celebrating the one month anniversary since genesis! And we’ve made it to layer 8,300--a new record. We also have 800 full p2p nodes on the network, most of which originate from our community members. Tweedledee is now community-owned!
  • Shout out to Sergey (@whataday2day), one of our community members, who even created a cool tap bot to give Smesh to testnet users. It’s working great so far!

Spacemesh Development

  • We are hiring Go developers for a 100% WFH / remote position on the core Spacemesh dev team.
  • We have started to build a robust Spacemesh full node API and data collection to support the new explorer and dashboard initiatives.
  • We have been working on several bug fixes and improvements to be released in the next Spacemesh app update for the testnet.
  • The core dev team has completed a 3 week sprint to document and cleanup go-spacemesh, the Go implementation of the Spacemesh full node. As a result, it's now more friendly for open source contributors and collaborators. Check out the go docs.

Spacemesh Design

  • We have final visual mocks for our reference dashboard and explorer, and for the oft-requested dark mode for the Spacemesh App. We’re working on developing and launching these apps, and would love to hear what you think!

Spacemesh SVM and Smart Wallets

  • Integration of the svm-gas crate into the SVM runtime.
  • High-level document planning SVM integration into go-spacemesh.
  • Started working on the App’s Storage Read ABI.

Spacemesh Community

  • Tomer Afek, Spacemesh’s co-founder, published a response to this essay by Haseeb Qureshi.
  • Our discord now has 328 members. Party on, guys!
  • Some of our community members are working overtime!
    multiple_smeshers

multiple_smeshers_2

Spacemesh Documentation

Update #60 - Week 3 + 4 - March 2020

Spacemesh Open Testnet - Tweedledee

  • We launched a new TweedleDee genesis on March 20th after the previous net had experienced an inconsistency issue due to a bug. We started with 300 managed p2p nodes and over 500 home smeshers subsequently joined the network within a week. The network is currently live and consistent.
  • Anyone, without any limitations, as long as their system meets the minimum requirements, can join the Testnet using the Spacemesh App or by directly building a full go-spacemesh node from source code for use as a CLI wallet.
  • The open testnet is serving its function! We’re finding bugs in both the Spacemesh App and in the go-spacemesh full node, and are working on fixing them. We've fixed over 100 desktop smeshing app bugs.
  • Quarantined at home? Have some free time on your hands? Join the testnet!
  • We are currently testing fixes to Spacemesh App bugs reported by the community and plan to release a minor Spacemesh App update within a few days with important fixes to the user experience.

Spacemesh Development

  • We adjusted team Spacemesh for fully remote work using GitHub, Zoom and Slack as all Spacemesh core devs are under some sort of #stayathome decree. So far, so good!
  • We have finished a two-week sprint to make the Spacemesh main open-source repos more friendly to open source contributors. We added lots of go-docs to our golang repos. Check out all of these juicy merged PRs.
  • We are working hard on implementing the missing pieces of the Spacemesh protocol and getting them ready for testing in the open testnet.
  • Our protocol docs are easier to browse than ever! Check them out here.

Spacemesh SVM and Smart Wallets

  • We plan to launch the Spacemesh mainnet with some programmability features. The main feature will be smart wallets with support for multi-signatures and vesting schedules.
  • Lane Rettig and Noam Nelke wrote an overview of transactions.
  • Adding receipts for the deploy-template & spawn-app.
  • Returning errors in the svm-runtime-c-api crate.
  • Simplifying the App-Storage state computation.
  • Adding namespace to the KV API.
  • Validating that raw transactions don’t contain extra payload.

Community:

  • Lane Rettig posted part VI in his “The key ingredients to a better blockchain” blog series, this time covering privacy.
  • We launched our open Discord community with many new channels. Please join here, if you haven’t already.

Our testnet users shared their smeshers with us!
Desktop_App

Desktop_App2

CLI_transactions

Update #59 - Week 1 + 2 - March 2020

Core Platform

  • Our devs have started designing and implementing the code for the missing Spacemesh consensus protocol components for release in upcoming Spacemesh open testnets.
  • We are working on a MultiSig Wallet app for the next major release of the Spacemesh open testnet as a tech preview of SVM tech (Spacemesh Virtual Machine) and smart contracts on Spacemesh! The code is almost ready and just requires testing.

Community

  • Spacemesh team member Lane Rettig published a blog post regarding the ethics of autonomous software, and how they relate to blockchain and governance.
  • Spacemesh team member Yaron Wittenstein published a new hackernoon blog post about the Importance of Unlearning.
  • The Spacemesh team is all working from home due to COVID-19, but that’s not slowing us down!
    IMG-20200316-WA0010

IMG-20200316-WA0008

Tweedledee - Spacemesh Open Testnet

  • We successfully soft-launched Tweedledee - the first Spacemesh open testnet - on March 1st. Since launch, we had over 100 people join the testnet from all over the world - mostly via word-of-mouth - and the network grew to about 700 p2p nodes from the 300 internally-managed p2p nodes to bootstrap the mesh. It currently runs about 440 full p2p nodes.
  • We started getting great feedback from the community and we have been busy fixing bugs and improving the network for the next app and p2p node update. Shout out to all who gave us feedback - you know who you are! Thanks to your invaluable input, we’re aiming to release a new minor app version with bug fixes in about 2 weeks.
  • We improved both the Testnet Guide and the Testnet FAQ based on user feedback and common questions.
  • We onboarded devs who wanted to join the Testnet by building go-spacmesh and our CLIWallet directly from source code and improved the joining documentation. We started to launch proper releases of go-spacemesh and the Spacemesh app for the testnet view github releases.
  • We operated the manual testnet tap and got many testnet users some Smesh to start playing around with coin transactions before getting their first smeshing coin rewards.
  • We ran a survey of early testnet users and received valuable feedback which was largely positive. Although users acknowledged that it was a bit rough around the edges, they were pleasantly surprised by how smoothly it ran at such an early stage.

Update #58 - Week 3 + 4 - February 2020

alice_tweedledee
John Tenniel's illustration, from Through the Looking-Glass (1871), chapter 4

From ffnet to Tweedledee

We launched a small experimental testnet for friends & family on Feb 15th with a network of 325 full nodes, and have been running the network for the last 2 weeks.

It’s super exciting for team Spacemesh to onboard our first group of real users using their home PCs, see them Smeshing, transacting with each other, and getting Smesh from the testnet tap.

We got some great feedback on the initial release, and already improved the user experience of the Spacemesh app by eliminating some annoying network requirements via p2p improvements, giving users complete control over where to store their proof-of-space file, and providing more information for users about their Smesher status.

Here’s some of the feedback we got:

“This is the smoothest UX i've experienced on a super early testnet”

“The visual feedback of this build is 10x better than the last, doesn't make you feel like it's just stuck”

“Just sent some SMD to someone. It works!!!

“I got my first smeshing reward!”

>> Tweedledee is Coming!

We finished preparing for the launch of our open testnet on March 1st including a new landing page and our comprehensive testnet guide. We call this release Spacemesh 0.1 / Tweedledee.

We are launching Tweedledee to learn from real users in the real world and the initial testnet release is just a beginning. It is experimental, has lots of bugs, and has a sub-optimal user experience - but it’s just the first iteration on our vision of home mining for everybody!

Follow the white rabbit...

Developers: Don’t Trust - Verify!

bi-monthly-screenshot1-1

We're pleased to announce that we've added support for building a Spacemesh full node (go-spacemesh) and a fully functional CLI wallet directly from source code, and that you can join the open testnet using these instead of using the Spacemesh app and its managed full node. See dev documentation.

SVM

  • Finished optimizing the raw transactions layouts.
  • Added more rustdoc examples. Mainly to the svm-runtime-c-api
  • Planning of the SVM integration into go-spacemesh
  • Started working on the SVM Wallet-App

Core Platform

bi-monthly-screenshot2

  • New testnet operational dashboard is up - we are getting ready for Tweedledee!
  • Major p2p improvements to support more type of home networks.
  • Fixed critical issues found in friends & family and closed testnet.

App

bi-monthly-screenshot3
We released v0.0.3 of the App for the launch of the open testnet. This release includes bug fixes from our small friends & family testnet and several nice improvements such as:

  • Added node status bar that displays the p2p network and sync status.
  • Removed port selection screen on app launch.
  • Improved post init file location flow and ui.
  • Added mesh status section to the settings.

Community

lane_meetup

  • Lane Rettig led an ffnet onboarding session at ETHDenver.

Update #57 - Week 1 + 2 - February 2020

banner_update_omage
Spacemesh Testnet App running on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Core Platform

  • The whole team has been focused on our upcoming open testnet launch in March. We are running an internal testnet, writing more tests and finding & fixing more bugs so anyone can join our open testnet in a few weeks.
  • We published a big chunk of the Spacemesh protocol docs for developers. This is an ongoing effort and additional guides are being added.
  • We published our updated 2020 roadmap on our road to mainnet.
  • We are finalizing a CLI wallet so people will be able to build a full node and the wallet from source code and join the testnet without using our reference GUI app.
  • We finished implementing and benchmarking a GPU optimized proof-of-space library utilizing the new cross-platform Vulkan GPU compute framework as well as OpenCL and Cuda. The library now provides an optimized implementation for all popular PC GPUs such as Nvidia and AMD on Windows, OS X and Linux. This library is going to be used to setup proof of space time on home PCs without hogging the CPU.

Community

SVM

  • Reclaiming SVM resources API (should be used when interfacing with C / FFI)
  • Working on storage-optimizations (will result in disk space savings for the end-user).

Update #56 - Week 3 + 4 - January 2020

Community:

  • We’re holding a Spacemesh meet-and-greet in Denver on February 13 (at ETHDenver), and one in San Francisco on February 18 (the day before the Stanford Blockchain Conference). More details are forthcoming on our Eventbrite page.
  • On February 9th, Moshe Shababo is co-hosting a technical meetup in Tel Aviv about how to build a proof-of-space-time based cryptocurrency, with Anton Lerner and Almog De-paz as speakers.

Spacemesh:

Update #55 - Week 1 + 2 - January 2020

Community:

Welcome to 2020! Headsup that we are switching to a bi-weekly (every 2 week) cadence for these updates.

Smesher:

  • We've found the memory leak that's been holding us back a few weeks now and have written code to fix it. PR is under review.
  • We're now testing the transaction mechanism with stress and stability tests and also testing sync.
  • We are running iterative closed testnets of between 200-300 nodes (currently 300) as we stabilize.
  • Merged issues

App

  • The bottleneck of updating the wallet file with recent changes (txs and rewards as txs) was removed.
  • Update doesn’t depend on retrieving tx statuses frequency.
  • App starts node from binary and not from container, most of run parameters are still hardcoded and any change requires app repackaging.
  • Business logic of querying node for it’s status and other requests were moved to later stage in order to allow running the node binary first.
  • Working on semi-automatic node start through the app.
  • closed issues in smapp repo.

SVM:

  • Finished the last big refactoring effort - now the code should look better (hygiene-wise).
  • Currently working mainly on the 'app template' feature. We’ll have something called an "app template" from which we’ll be able to spawn multiple instances (called apps). Each app will have its own storage. All apps will use the same code defined in the app template. The motivation is to encourage code reuse and save on-mesh storage. (since we share code)
  • check out the repo

Update #54 - Week 3 + 4 - December 2019

Community:

  • Wow what a year it has been. From everyone over here at Spacemesh, we hope you have a wonderful holiday season and happy new year. Here is the end of year wrap up - a summary of everything we accomplished over the course of 2019. Here's to 2020!
Happy new year from the Spacemesh Team!
  • We held a product summit where we defined our goals for iterative testnets and the road to mainnet.
Tal Moran, Chief Scientist, and Lane Rettig, Spacemesh Engineer @ our product summit.

Smesher:

  • We have been testing the nodes sync and transaction processing, investigating memory leaks as well.
  • Merged issues

App:

  • App is getting TXs from node and updates statuses in the UI. Smeshing rewards are displayed as transactions too now.
  • We are also working on a more robust way to save wallet data to disk to prevent data loss.
  • Finished refactoring to speed up the app and changed addresses length to match node settings
  • Autoupdater for Windows in progress
  • closed issues in smapp repo.

SVM:

  • Refactored the codebase to improve code hygiene.
  • decoupling wasmer from SVM external interface. This will open the door to having go-svm relying only on the svm object file (which will use wasmer internally, but this fact should become obvious to the end-user consuming svm)
  • check out the repo

Update #53 - Week 2 - December 2019

Community:

SVM:

GPU-Smeshing Setup Project:

  • Phase I completed successfully with great results
  • Starting phase II project this week
  • We have a working gpu smeshing init library for Windows and Linux supporting AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
  • Next phase is to support OS X, Intel GPUs and get better performance on AMD GPUs
  • This week we ran tests for correctness on all supported platforms and GPU types - they all passed

Smesher:

  • We are testing transaction, sync, and trying to run long runs and monitor memory.
  • We are tracking down the source of the memory leak bug we are experiencing.
  • Merged issues

App:

  • App receives rewards from Smeshing, notifies the user about each reward, displays the correct Smesher log-in screen.
  • closed issues in smapp repo.

Update #52 - Week 1 - December 2019

Community

Tomer Afek, Spacemesh co-founder, speaks to a full lecture hall of IDC Computer Science students

App

  • Testing the Spacemesh App with a Smesher connected to one of our closed testnets, and successfully started smeshing and getting rewards!
  • Finishing transactions and rewards display issues.
  • closed issues in smapp repo.

GPU Smeshing Library

  • Linux support
  • AMD code optimizations performance improvements
  • Support for 50% GPU memory and core operational mode
  • For more info please see the repo

Smesher

  • We finished functional testing on a 1,000 Smeshers testnet and began tests on a 1,500 Smeshers testnet.
  • Merged issues

Update #51 - Week 4 - November 2019

  • This week we are continuing to work on the tasks from the previous updates and we are focused on fixing all issues and stabilizing the network for the open testnet release… sign up to be a Smesher on testnet
  • new open source repo - GPU post init with working code for AMD and Nvidia cards and some benchmarks.

Community:

Update #50 - Week 3 - November 2019

Community:

App:

Smesher:

  • Performing acceptance testing of the infrastructure for Testnet.
  • Running functional testing of the node to identify gaps and bugs.
  • Merged issues

Spacemesh Virtual Machine (SVM):

Update #49 - Week 2 - November 2019

Community:

App:

Smesher:

  • Refining APIs for the node for integration of the node binary with the Spacemesh App UI.
  • Running functional testing on the Testnet infrastructure, and defining gaps.
  • Merged issues

Spacemesh Virtual Machine (SVM):

  • Rewriting the gas-estimation algorithm to be of a linear complexity
  • We have funded several SVM tasks for open source contributors- check them out on Gitcoin

Update #48 - Week 1 - November 2019

Community:

  • Spacemesh Co-Founder Tomer Afek spoke at SF Blockchain Week 2019.
  • Spacemesh Chief Scientist Tal Moran presented his latest theoretical work on Proofs of Space Time at CESC 2019 in San Francisco.
  • We launched the Spacemesh Ambassadors Program - sign up here
  • We created a Spacemesh Protocol Overview to further explain what powers Spacemesh under the hood. Check it out
Tal Moran speaking at CESC 2019

App:

Go-Spacemesh Smesher:

  • Revised some of the PoET APIs
  • Added VRF validation to Hare messages
  • Refactored our logging Infra to support different log levels.
  • Merged issues

Spacemesh Virtual Machine (SVM)

Update #47 - Week 5 - October 2019

Community:

App:

Go-Spacemesh:

  • The node's core protocols are code complete, only thing left are minor changes in the Smesher's API.
  • Merged issues

Update #46 - Week 4 - October 2019

Community:

Spacemesh CEO Tomer Afek speaking at meetup in Beijing

Go-spacemesh

  • We are finalizing the first release of the Spacemesh open testnet. We call it Spacemesh 0.1. Anyone with a PC, an Internet connection and some free disk space should be able to join. We are working hard to release Spacemesh 0.1 this December.
  • finished revamping most guide content to reflect sm 0.1 functionality
  • added guide page about s0.1 to clarify the final feature set
  • Merged issues

App

Update #45 - Week 3 - October 2019

Community:

  • Meetup in Beijing, China on October 15 - join us
Spacemesh CEO Tomer Afek at Dragonfly Crypto Summit Panel in Beijing, China
Lane Rettig at meetup in Osaka, Japan

App:

Go-Spacemesh

  • We are writing documentation and adding comments to code in preparation for open testnet.
  • Merged issues

Update #44 - Week 2 - October 2019

Community:

Lane engaging the Tokyo Crypto Dev community
  • we’re organizing a meetup here in Osaka this weekend - join us
  • Crypt-O-Mesh Technology Room Session with Tal Moran watch
  • "A New Human Chain" blog by Lane Rettig about why he joined Spacemesh

App:

Spacemesh Virtual Machine (SVM):

Go-Spacemesh client:

  • Added signatures to activation transactions and NIPoST persistency as part of our node reboot tolerance.
  • We are running tests and defining the protocol parameters and specs that we will run the test net with.
  • Merged issues

Update #43 - Week 1 - October 2019

Community:

Spacemesh goes to China

SVM (Spacemesh Virtual Machine)

App

  • Various bug fixes. See
  • Defined end-user labeling of TXs here

Go-Spacemesh Client

  • Shifting our focus to start large scale cloud testing for testnet readiness.
  • We are also starting a process of documenting our code and updating our wikis as preparation for test net launch.
  • Merged issues

Update #42 - Week 4 - September 2019

Community

Crypt-O-Mesh Recap

App

  • Getting app functional on Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) in addition to MacOs
  • app testing on five-node local network, initial sandbox integration
  • Merged fixes

Go-Spacemesh Client

Spacemesh Virtual Machine (SVM)

  • Stabilization efforts continue.

Update #41 - Week 3 - September 2019

Community

  • Friday the 13th Crypt-O-Mesh event was highly successful, with over 250 people attending including the most disruptive minds of our time. Thanks for a great night everyone.
  • In NYC, we had another Core Devs meetup last week, where Emin Gün Sirer spoke about AVA Labs and Ryan John King spoke about FOAM Protocol It’s quickly developing into a respected, small-but-focused and high quality group of people coming together monthly to do a tech deep dive.
Emin Gün Sirer

App

  • Fixes and improvements after 2 rounds of reviews and QA, moving forward to full integration with node. Fixed bugs

Go-Spacemesh Client

  • Implemented a safe node shutdown
  • Added fetch queue to avoid double requests on same data when syncing
  • Added some fixes and memory optimizations to the Hare Protocol
  • Merged issues

Spacemesh Virtual Machine (SVM)

  • We are continuing to stabilize the codebase before moving towards the next milestone, which is a standalone smart contracts vm based on wasmer with fixed storage / no gas metering.

Research

Update #40 - Week 2 - September 2019

We apologize for the break in weekly updates and are recommitting to ensuring that they are published regularly moving forward.

Community

Lane Rettig at NYC Core Developer Meetup
Lane Rettig at NYC Core Developer Meetup

App

  • The App team is completing the first round of QA and design review for the new visual look. We are preparing to publish version 0.0.1.

Go-Spacemesh Client

  • Added an event infrastructure and event collector sidecar for future statistics and blockmesh analysis. Wallets could also derive account-specific data from collector DB.
  • Alongside many bug fixes, we’ve introduced fetch queues to optimize data fetching from peers, added abstain votes for blocks and limited the number of atxs included in each block.
  • We’ve upgraded our testing infrastructure to use Jenkins pipelines to give us better automated testing and task monitoring. Merged issues.

Spacemesh Virtual Machine (SVM)

  • We are stabilizing the codebase before moving towards the next milestone, which is a standalone smart contracts vm based on wasmer with fixed storage / no gas metering.

Update #39 - Week 1 - August 2019

Community

  • Published new blog post by Spacemesh co-founder Tomer Afek. Spacemesh Manifesto
  • We are organizing a new kind of monthly developer-focused meetup in NYC. First meetup is on 8/12. In NYC? Join us!

Open Source

App

  • The App team is focused on implementing the new visual look for the App for the open testnet milestone

go-spacemesh Client

  • The go-spacemesh team has been working hard on fixing bugs and preparing the client for our upcoming open testnet. Merged issues

Spacemesh Virtual Machine (SVM)

  • Good progress on the Spacemesh virtual machine project - the runtime for execution of smart contracts in the Spacemesh platform

Update #38 - Week 4 - July 2019

  • Go-spacemesh: focus is on stabilizing a 300 nodes closed testnet and fixing bugs.
  • App: implementing new visual designs. Here's a sneak peek at what's coming:

welcome_screen

wallet_screen

Update #37 - Week 3 - July 2019

Update #36 - Week 2 - July 2019

localnet
Localnet is coming!

  • Getting the Spacemesh local testnet ready for devs to hack on! We are improving the scripts a bit and hope to be able to support Win 10 Pro. Currently OS X and Linux are supported.
  • Usability testing and finalization of the Spacemesh App UX for the open testnet release.

mining
Sneak peek - Spacemesh App new look is coming!

Update #35 - Week 1 - July 2019

Full Node

This week we’ve introduced sending poet proofs by gossip and added Block and ATX syntactic validation checks on data received from gossip network. We are moving forward towards a local test net able to run few instances on a local environment. We are also moving ahead with our scaling efforts, testing out different number of participating nodes, fixing bugs as we go on.

App

Update #34 - Week 4 - June 2019

This week the core dev team was focused on getting the platform ready for the local testnet milestone. The goal is to have a working dockerized local testnet running on a dev box. For details see https://testnet.spacemesh.io/#/local . The app dev team has been working on integrating the full node process into the app on node transactions integration.

Update #33 - Week 3 - June 2019

  • Full node: Added ed21599 signatures to transactions and made the p2p addressbook persistent to store, and configurable from store. we've added numerous improvements to our automations tests and to the framework itself, as a preparation for more rigorous tests.
  • App: focus is on node integration for getting transactions and statuses and on error handling across the app.
  • Community: Made available Wasm 2019 Berlin Workshop videos.

Update #32 - Week 2 - June 2019

App

Full Node

  • Eligibility oracle but fixes and work on stabilizing and refining mining and p2p tests

Community

Update #31 - Week 1 - June 2019

App

Full Node / Client

  • Merged the new VRF eligibility oracle that relies on previously merged bls signature schemes
  • Merged the activation transaction sync flow
  • Added a network on-the-wire and in-memory deduplication to reduce bandwidth
  • Track our progress by browsing go-spacmesh merged PRs

Community

smesh1
Yaron Wittenstein from team Spacemesh talks about WASM smart contracts

  • We co-hosted and participated in WASM on the Blockchain 2019 Berlin workshop. The weekend workshop at Full Node Berlin was jam-packed with excellent sessions and discussions. Videos and decks will be published soon. WASM smart contracts are coming to your favorite blockchain, but we have several big challenges to overcome first...

Update #30 - Week 4 - May 2019

Full Node

The team is working hard on stabilizing the full node for our upcoming testnet milestone. We are running mining flows and handling bugs related to data availability, p2p and various memory performance issues.

App

Community

tal_whiteboard_session

  • Whiteboard sessions podcast from NY blockchain week is now available on Youtube. Please watch to get an overview of the consensus protocol.
  • If you prefer reading than watching videos then please check out our new blog post - Spacemesh protocol motivation

Update #29 - Week 3 - May 2019

After finishing to implement most of the Spacemesh Protocol major flows, we are now focused on testing and benchmarking to verify our network is tuned up to work with many nodes at scale on the cloud using our automation framework.

We are doing tests and benchmarks for gossip, mining, sync and consensus protocols. Another on-going effort is integration of the BLS signature scheme into the platform.

On the App front, this week we integrated our Edwards25519 WASM library into the App and worked on the App's desktop notifications feature.

For more details check out our pulse.

Update #28 - Week 2 - May 2019

Community

whiteboard_sessions_podcast

  • We recorded a whiteboard session videocast with Tal Moran in NYC - episode coming online soon!

testnet

  • Thanks for coming to listen to Tal Moran and Iddo Bentov from team Spacemesh at our NYC blockchain week meetup.

Tech

Update #27 - Week 1 - May 2019

App & Full Node

Update #26 - Week 4 - April 2019

Community

  • Finalized blockchain projects participation for our tech-focused meetup in NYC blockchain week. there's still some open spots. RSVP soon :-)
  • Finalized participation from awesome wasm people for WASM on the blockchain workshop we are helping to put together in Berlin in June. If you care about WASM on the blockchain then you should apply to participate! https://avive.github.io/wasm_on_the_blockchain/#/

Research

Tech

Spacemesh Full Node

Spacemesh App

ED25519 Public Key Extraction Go Library

https://github.com/spacemeshos/ed25519

  • An open-source drop-in replacement to golang/crypto/ed25519 with additional functionality.

  • We have developed this for the Spacemesh protocol since we could not find a good open source alternative. We hope that the open source blockchain dev community will find these capabilities useful in other scenarios and platforms.

  • In the ed25519 signature scheme, in order to verify the validity of a given signature, the validator should posses the public key of the signer. It can be sent along with the message and its signature, which means that the overall data being sent includes 256 bits of the public key. Our function allows to extract the public key from the signature (and the message), thus the public key may not be sent, resulting in a smaller transferred data.

Update #25 - Week 3 - April 2019

COMMUNITY

TECH

Update #24 - Week 2 - April 2019

Spacemesh App (Wallet + Full Node)

Spacemesh Core (Full Node + POET Service)

Update #23 - Week 1 - April 2019

Spacemesh Core (Full Node + POET Service)

Spacemesh App (Wallet + Full Node)

Lots of merged PRs for the core App screens

Community

We just announced our this free community 2 days workshop for blockchain and layer-2 projects that are working on wasm tech for their programmability features. Join us in Berlin this June for this special event. Participants include builders from ewasm, parity, mozilla, wasm and wasmer.io. People from Spacemesh have been working on putting together this event with great people from ewasm, 1kx and Parity.

Update #22 - Week 4 - March 2019

Spacemesh p2p full node

Spacemesh POET Service

Spacemesh App (Wallet + Full Node GUI)

Update #21 - Week 3 - March 2019

Update #20 - Week 2 - March 2019

Community
token2049

Spacemesh’s Co-Founder Tomer Afek leading a panel in Token 2049 discussing the challenges and potential opportunities of Web 3.0

Core Dev Team

Update #19 - Week 1 - March 2019

Update #18 - Week 4 - Feb 2019

Update #17 - Week 3 - Feb 2019

Update #16 - Week 2 - Feb 2019

  • Merged first implementation of a running full node with Hare consensus protocol and unoptimized tortoise
  • Merged a new system-wide logging service that supports sending and events and metrics to a global test network orchestrator
  • Merged a fixed size pseudo-random Oracle for role and block validation as preparation for system testing
  • Implemented rudimentary CLI wallet
  • Added definitions and flow charts for the Hare protocol
  • Merged basic POET server infrastructure
  • Announced our next upcoming live dev community sync on Youtube. Set a reminder and ask us anything
  • Merged the first test of a complete network running hare and tortoise consensus protocols, agreeing on the state of the networks shared ledger
  • Merged optimal Tortoise protocol implementation
  • Added node events for improved test networks debugging
  • Added genesis state configuration

Update #15 - Week 1 - Feb 2019

Update #14 - Week 4 - Jan 2019

  • Easier go-spacemesh dev environment setup. This will help the core dev team and open source contributors to work more efficiently
  • Extended and improved the Hare protocol test suite
  • Switched to NaCL authentication and encryption in P2P layer. PR merged
  • Fixed some tests that failed on local machines. #469 and #466
  • Added POET prover-verifier integration tests for benchmarking the protocol
  • Announcing our #2 core dev community sync - live on Youtube on Feb 3rd https://youtu.be/85eazslNWqU - The core dev team will answer any technical question about Spacemesh asked in our Gitter dev talk as well as live questions on the Youtube stream via the chat feature
  • We made public our Proofs of Elapsed Time service reference repo
  • New post on / - Proofs of Space Time and Decentralization - video recording and slides of Iddo Bentov’s presentation in Amsterdam Bitcoin Wednesday /iddo-bitcoin-wednesday/
  • Finished our first UX design iteration for the Spacemesh Full Node and Wallet App for desktop computers, and published our learnings from 2 usability testing sessions

Update #13 - Week 3 - Jan 2019

We are getting closer to run our first nodes test network, currently without mining capabilities.

Created a rudimentary wallet grpc and HTTP API for use in the test network

Created a test Rolacle (Roles oracle) for testing our hare protocol

Update #12 - Week 2 - Jan 2019

go-spacemesh

Wallet

  • Finalized an iteration of the Spacemesh Wallet App desktop UX for another round of usability tests

Update #11 - Week 1 - Jan 2019

Update #10 - Week 4 - December 2018

Update #9 - Week 3 - December 2018

Update #8 - Weeek 1 & 2 - December 2018

Spacemesh Full Node

Product

Spacemesh App (Wallet + Dashboard)

  • Published revision 0.2 of the Spacemesh App design for desktop class screens

  • Published tests implementing the core Spacemesh Wallet security design - Basic BLS key derivation from random seed, 12 words mnemonic for paper backups and wallet file user pin protection via KDF2 and AES

  • Integrated a high-performance WASM BLS signatures library and put together some tests to demonstrating usage pattern

  • Published draft of the Spacemesh API for connecting the Wallet with the Spacemesh blockmesh

POET Service

Update #7 - Week 3 - November 2018

  • Initial version POET GO prover and verifier merged

  • First version of the Tortoise protocol merged

  • A first commit of the new Hare protocol message structure

  • First version of the gossip protocol merged

  • Preliminary design of Spacemesh global state and transaction processor

  • Sync protocol implementation PR

Update #6 - Week 1 and 2 - November 2018

hack2

Update #5 - Week 4 - October 2018

  • Fewer PR merges and more devcon4 learnings and community engagement for the core dev team this week.

  • Devnet: Implemented the bootstrap scenario. Improved infra and refactoring some of its interfaces. Merged #46 .

  • Poet (VDF) black-box reference go prover: Added support for pluggable hash functions and for scrypt-based hashing. Pref optimization based on profiling and benchmarking. Open source go prover: #9 code review in progress. Come build VDFs with us.

Update #4 - Week 3 - October 2018

tlv-meetup

Dev

  • Merged PR: listening port is now sent in handshake
  • Gossip is in testing phase in branch p2p-gossip
  • Published gossip protocol design doc
  • Testing RPC api functionality in the TLV hackathon branch
  • Work in progress on the core proofs of elapsed time (POET) server go implementation by open source contributors
  • Code completed and heavily testing new black-box POET prover and verifier GO implementation based on the shared spec
  • Work started on the POET protocol spec implementation. Spec draft updated with more details
  • Work started on many Spacemesh App feature tasks by open source contributors. Join us here
  • Gitcoin funded several dev tasks to tip open source contributors with cryptocurrency
  • Extensive work on the DEVNET, that could test system scenarios on our decentralized network is gaining momentum. This week we managed to create some basic scenarios that included interaction between several P2P nodes. PR #42 merged plus 8 additional merged PRs

Community

Update #3 - Week 1 and 2 - October 2018

tal_m_cesc-1

tomer_blockchqin_week

  • Core dev team go-spacemesh project updates:

    • On-going dev work at full steam ahead on p2p and the consensus protocol
    • Set requirements for the Transaction processor and Account DB - two components that are representing the node's internal view of the mesh
    • Set requirements for the mesh sync protocol that will allow a node to get the current mesh state for which a consensus can be proved
    • Fixed a bug in the connection cache where in case two node's tried to simultaneously connect to each other they ended up with both connections getting closed
    • Fixed a bug in the secured session where due to the nature of the crypto package that we are using, the decryption of messages that got encrypted and sent on the wire in different order failed.
    • Made the listening port configurable and allowing nodes to discover other node's listening port using dht's discovery protocol
    • The Spacemesh devnet cloud testing environment is getting into shape currently it supports spawning full nodes with agents that poll commands from the automation server that sets off node's api calls. Soon it will support testing bootstrap scenarios

  • Join our upcoming Tel Aviv Hackathon - Hack the future of nations The first hackathon for reinventing the way countries work using P2P decentralized technologies

  • We are hiring full time blockchain developers in New York and in Tel Aviv! New positions here

  • Proofs of Elapsed Time (POET) MVP spec published and reviewed by our research team and dev work started by open source collaborators. We are actively looking for additional open source contributors for this project

  • Product work completed for the first version of the Spacemesh Wallet including detailed use cases and UX. Dev work started by open source developers. Join gitter our dev talk here. Good progress with contributors breaking down spec to good github dev tasks.

  • We are proud to be able to tip open source contributors with cryptocurrency via Gitcoin and to appear at a nice spot among great other blockchain projects on this leaderboard. Watch this space for additional bounties

  • Launched new public product repo for all Spacemesh high-level product work and published a draft of the high-level product plan

Update #2 - Week 1 - September 2018

panel

  • Dev and research teams update: work in progress on tasks mentioned in last week's update
  • Published protocol stack - a series of personal blog posts from developers about interesting technical challenges involved in their work on the Spacemesh protocol. You can see these on our community page by filtering on the "protocol stack" tag.
  • Published a new welcome to Spacemesh video to explain some of the project’s core ideas and concepts /
  • Hosted a “blockchain reality check” panel in SpacemeshTLV rooftop with great panelists including @hosseeb, @heatherharde ,@cryptomanran, @tomerafek and @yaronsamid MCing
  • Announced new funding and partnerships with Metastable, Polychain, Coinbase, 1kx, Dekrypt, Slow Ventures and others. See: /funding/
  • Talked about fair protocols beyond POW and PoStake at https://www.dezentral.io/ in Berlin and @avive from the team participated in the Beyond Ethereum panel

Update #1 - Week 4 - August 2018

  • Our dev and research teams are working on the Gossip p2p protocol and the Tortoise & Hare consensus algorithms. This is a multi-week ongoing effort as these tasks are at the heart of the Spacemesh protocol
  • 2 new full-time developers have joined our growing core dev team. We are actively hiring strong crypto developers who make quality contributions to one of our open source projects
  • We published a draft requirements and design for the Spacemesh public proof of elapsed time (POET) service. We fully work in the open on this (and all other projects) so you are welcome to join and participate in the api design phase
  • Some good product and UX work on the Spacemesh Wallet and Dashboard App. We have finalized the requirements and the initial user experience and posted everything to the repo
  • We reached the alpha milestone for Spacemesh Cosmic - our open source seed project for building hyper-universal apps (desktop/mobile native/web). You can use Cosmic to build your own universal apps. We are using Cosmic ourselves as the base app scaffolding for the Spacemesh App. We also tipped major contributors for their voluntary work on this project using gitcoin bounties
  • Next week... we are speaking about race-free and asic-resistant consensus in dezentral.ion . Come see us if you are coming to Blockchain week Berlin!

IMG_2781