On Listing... Slowly

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Spacemesh won’t be, either.

Dear Smeshers,

Over the past few weeks many community members have expressed a desire that the $SMH coin be listed on exchanges to facilitate trading, and frustration with how hard it is to buy or trade the coin today. We hear your concerns and we understand them. Some miners need a safe place to access liquidity, and others want to be able to trade the coin with peace of mind. We want to clarify where we stand with respect to the question of exchanges and listing.

Firstly, and most importantly: the easiest, cheapest, and safest way to get your hands on the Spacemesh coin is and always will be to mine it yourself. Spacemesh is a bespoke protocol designed specifically for mining from home! Download the Smapp application, allocate some hard drive space (the minimum is currently 256 GiB), and start mining—you’ll have your first coins soon. In addition to earning coins you’ll also be helping secure the Spacemesh network and helping increase the degree of decentralization. (You can find more information on the resource requirements for mining, and you can follow this guide to get started.)

We’re aware that several small exchanges have already listed the $SMH coin. Please be aware that we had nothing to do with these listings. We didn’t approve them and we didn’t pay for them. These exchanges independently decided to list the coin. Due to security concerns, we think it’s still premature for exchanges to list the coin (more on why below). However, the Spacemesh protocol is and always will be permissionless. It’s not up to us what applications (including exchanges) people build on Spacemesh or what people do with the coin. We’re not in the business of policing these things, nor will we ever be. We couldn’t stop people from building things even if we tried, by design!

We’re a small team of builders with limited resources. We’re not financial engineers, market makers, or business development types. 100% of our attention and resources are focused on improving the protocol, improving our software, and addressing the many outstanding issues you’ve raised. We’ll also continue to work on improving documentation (such as the Integration Guide) and providing technical support where possible to streamline the process of building apps on Spacemesh—all kinds of apps.

First and foremost, we’re focused on ensuring the long-term health of the Spacemesh network and community. And actively listing our coins on exchanges is not presently in the scope of that mission. 

While we agree that it would be nice if there were one or more sanctioned, secure sites for buying and selling $SMH, we’re also not in the business of reviewing and sanctioning exchanges. If the last year or two taught us nothing else, it taught us that no exchange can ever be totally trusted. We strongly encourage you to custody your own coins using the Smapp wallet. Not your keys, not your coins.

In addition to building the protocol and maintaining the network, the other thing we’re working on is making sure the protocol and network are as secure as they can be. We’ll do this through both an internal security review process and also by partnering with third party security professionals including auditors. This process is underway and we’ll release more information about it soon, including how long we expect it’ll take. We think it’s critical that this process be completed before the coin is listed anywhere else.

Another idea that’s been raised is bridging the Spacemesh coin to other blockchains. Unfortunately this isn’t as simple as it sounds. Bridges are complex and they’re not easy to operate. They vastly increase the attack area of a protocol, which is why they get hacked so often. Adding a bridge to Spacemesh today would require big changes to the protocol: a new precompile at the very least, if not a full VM. Spacemesh will have these things in time, but we can’t responsibly rush the process of developing them because that would be insecure. And this work has to be prioritized alongside the critical tasks mentioned above.

If you’re an exchange interested in listing the Spacemesh coin, we strongly encourage you to wait until this security review process is complete. At this time we have no intention of paying exchange listing fees or paying exchanges to help market the Spacemesh coin. Feel free to review the Integration Guide, and to come meet the community in our Discord.

Finally, a few important reminders:

• Spacemesh is immature, alpha software. It probably still has plenty of bugs. Please do not invest more in the project than you can afford to lose. We strongly discourage speculation; we strongly encourage home mining and self-custody!
• We cannot vouch for any particular exchange or platform that offers trading in Spacemesh coins, nor can we offer support for these platforms. Please do your own research and be extraordinarily careful when sending coins to any third party including an exchange. If you have an issue with an exchange, please contact that exchange’s support department.
• Remember: not your keys, not your coins. The only safe way to custody $SMH coins is to hold them in your own Smapp wallet, and to securely back up the recovery phrase.
• The Spacemesh community Discord is not the right place to discuss coin price or trading. You’re free to do so elsewhere or to set up alternative discussion forums, but we’ll continue to enforce this policy on our Discord.
• Be alert for scams! They happen every day in our industry. Be especially cautious of someone claiming to be a member of the Spacemesh team, or that they work for an exchange. Follow only these official channels for communication from the team.

It’s easy to get ahead of ourselves and rush into things like bridges and exchange listings, but we feel it’s important to be patient and develop these things slowly in a responsible fashion. We’re building Spacemesh for the very long run, and that takes time and care.

Onward, Smeshers!