Project Brief

Spacemesh is a group of academia researchers and engineers set to rebuild from scratch the operating system powering an energy-efficient, decentralized, secure, and scalable smart contracts global computer and a cryptocurrency in the permissionless settings.

For Blockchain revolution to have real impact on productivity growth, it must sustain equality in access to resources. The current state of the PoW mining industry fails to meet this requirement. In addition, other near-future innovations involve PoStake, which require large deposits to be staked upfront, and may thus be even worse on this front.

The heart of Spacemesh OS is a new consensus protocol that replaces PoW with Proof of Space Time (PoST), and simpler chain with a mesh topology. The Spacemesh protocol allows newcomers to contribute to the security of the cryptocurrency network via unused storage space on their hard drives. PoST retains the properties of PoW that are useful for permissionless consensus, but with drastically lower energy emissions. In contrast to PoStake, the PoST mechanism enables users to participate in the system without locking any security deposit, and also avoids other nothing-at-stake problems, such as the higher risk of divergence due to hard-fork replicas.

By leveraging the already-existing, worldwide free disk-space distribution, our low-to-no barrier to entry, and our protocol’s high incentive compatibility, the Spacemesh infrastructure, beyond improving on decentralization, security and scale, also achieves two newly introduced, yet essential properties:

1. Fairness and genuine inclusiveness for all network participants
   Fairness is the final blockchain frontier, and the only real protection against further disruption in the open source era. Allowing anyone to run a node from home opens the door for next level network effects, and better utilization of the blockchain distributed ownership model. As well, hundreds of millions of people around the world stand a fair and equal chance to obtain Spacemesh coins, essentially regardless of their initial capital
2. Long-term sustainability
   As the network grows in size and usage, and coin price fluctuates, our incentive-compatible protocol design will maintain the profit margin of the home miner confronted with potential investors trying to gain unfair advantage,-and guarantee that an honest miner will obtain a fair share of the rewards, regardless of the actions of other miners.

SpacemeshOS can support a highly-scalable network with thousands of transactions per second, without compromising the decentralized nature of the system. Furthermore, the blockmesh enables far more frequent rewards than a blockchain, which means that pressures against decentralization are thwarted, since the individual miners have no need to rely on centralized mining pools.

For a more in-depth overview please read our recently published white paper 1.

Background

The Spacemesh project originated in the world of academia, when Prof. Tal Moran, who had been looking into using storage to achieve consensus for the past 5 years, invented proof of space-time. He first presented it in 2016 - arguing that storage space is a highly underutilized and readily available resource fit for decentralized consensus. Prof. Moran went on to work with a colleague, Dr. Iddo Bentov, on Meshcash (2017), a highly-scalable and incentive-compatible cryptocurrency framework that replaces the chain’s race condition with mesh topology, as explained here.

Later that same year, Aviv Eyal and Tomer Afek reached out to Prof. Moran to discuss implementing his work. Tal added Dr. Iddo Bentov to the team, and together they came up with the novel Spacemesh protocol, which uses neither PoW nor PoStake, is mathematically-proven secure, and scales to many thousands of transactions per second.

Team Spacemesh is 100% committed to our vision and values of building the most fair, decentralized, fast and secure p2p blockmesh infrastructure. We’re comprised of seasoned entrepreneurs with past successes, who believe in raising the Spacemesh coin market cap gradually over the next decade, protecting the upside for builders and miners that will join along the way - as such, company is in no rush to raise a fortune.