On Partnerships

Dear Smeshers,

We’ve recently had a lot of inbound interest in partnerships from individuals and companies in the community building apps and infrastructure on top of Spacemesh. We couldn’t be more excited about this trend! One important measure of the health and success of any network and community is when community members start to build things the creators aren’t even aware of. While it’s important to remember that it’s still quite early in the life of the protocol and the network, we think this indication at this early stage is a strong vote of confidence in Spacemesh itself and in the health and viability of the community.

First things first: as we’ve said many times before, Spacemesh is permissionless and we encourage everyone in the community to develop on top of Spacemesh. While doing so today is challenging due to the lack of documentation, tooling, etc., it will get easier as the project and protocol continue to mature and as the community grows. If you’re building something on Spacemesh today or thinking of doing so, we encourage you to talk to us and other builders in the community. Let us know what’s working well for you, what’s not, what you need, and how we can help. The #dev_discussion channel on Discord is a great place to start.

In the interest of fairness and transparency we want to be clear about where we stand on the question of partnerships. As we mentioned in previous blog posts, the Spacemesh core team is small and we’re totally focused on the important task of advancing protocol R&D and ensuring network health, stability, and security. We’re not currently in the business of negotiating partnerships. While some partnerships can be mutually beneficial and can advance our goals and align with our values, in our experience the vast majority of partnerships are “window dressing” that projects tend to announce when they don’t have more substantial R&D successes to share. We prefer to focus on what really matters today.

Furthermore, we cannot in good faith officially endorse any team or project without first undertaking a due diligence process that involves among other things code audits and a security review. We put a great deal of effort into making sure the code we ship is as secure and reliable as possible and we’d hold any partners to the same standard. Unfortunately we do not currently have the resources to perform code audits or security reviews of third party code; if we did so for every inbound request we’d literally spend 100% of our time on this and we’d be totally unable to make progress on Spacemesh itself! For this reason, at this time we won’t be endorsing any official partnerships. We reserve the right to change our minds in the future as circumstances and resources allow.

In the meantime, for those that are interested in building on Spacemesh, we encourage you to make use of the resources that are already available including the Integration Guide and official Discord. We also strongly encourage you to work in the open as we do: to open source your code and to choose a permissive, open source compatible license such as MIT or GPL. This is in line with the Spacemesh community values and is an important cornerstone in building trust, and will be a prerequisite for deeper engagement on the part of the Spacemesh team.

We’re happy to share the achievements and successes of our community members and do so regularly on the #community-contributions channel on Discord, on the @teamspacemesh X account, and elsewhere. If you’ve built something exciting please let us know so we can help get the word out to the community! But please be aware that for now we’re unable to offer official endorsements or partnerships.

We couldn’t be more excited to build the future of Spacemesh together. Expect to hear a lot more from us in the coming days and weeks about how we’ll facilitate building apps and infrastructure.

Team Spacemesh

Resources
- Spacemesh Documentation
- Spacemesh Github
- Spacemesh Node API
- Integration Guide
- Spacemesh 101
- Spacemesh Discord