A free and fair blockchain for all
Subspace is a next-generation blockchain that allows anyone to participate in consensus without having to buy special hardware, burn electricity, or purchase a coin.
Subspace is a next-generation blockchain that allows anyone to participate in consensus without having to buy special hardware, burn electricity, or purchase a coin.
Cryptocurrency has become increasingly centralized. Mining farms, staking pools, and trusted exchanges dominate the industry. Our goal is to build the most decentralized blockchain on the planet and make crypto exciting again.
Satoshi Nakamoto famously introduced consensus based on Proofs-of-Work under the mantra “one-CPU-one-vote”, allowing anyone to mine using their home computer. Unfortunately, this quickly gave way to “one-ASIC-one-vote”. Today, a handful of ASIC farms rule the network while burning massive amounts of electricity every day. This is not decentralized or environmentally sustainable.
In an effort to provide a sustainable alternative, proof-of-stake blockchains employ a system of virtual mining based on one’s wealth, under the adage “one-coin-one-vote”. Unfortunately, this does not hold true to Nakamoto’s original vision for blockchain, and instead reflects a permissioned and plutocratic alternative. In practice, staking is highly centralized and only serves to make the rich even richer.
What is instead needed is a system based on an underlying resource that is already widely distributed. Blockchains based on proof-of-capacity achieve this, by replacing compute-intensive mining with storage-intensive farming, under the maxim “one-disk-one-vote”. Unfortunately, all existing designs lack incentive-compatibility, due to a mechanism design challenge known as the farmer’s dilemma.
In a Proof-of-Capacity blockchain, farmers must decide whether to allocate scarce storage resources towards either maintaining the chain state and history or maximizing the amount of space they pledge towards consensus. Rational farmers will always choose the latter, at best becoming light-clients, while at worst encouraging pooled farming under a few trusted operators.
It has been suggested that blockchains cannot scale without sacrificing either security or decentralization. While recent research has shown that security can be maintained, the burden of syncing and maintaining the state and history remains. Since Subspace already resolves these issues, in order to circumvent the farmer’s dilemma, it is indeed able to scale without making compromises.
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The future is multi-chain and it's clear that users prefer AMMs over centralized exchanges. Subspace provides the layer one scalability needed to bridge numerous chains while allowing for trustless, low-latency, and high-throughput asset exchange.
Since the history may grow far beyond the storage capacity of any single farmer, yet is still priced efficiently, Subspace is uniquely able to provide cheap, permanent dApp storage, while still making the data available to a global execution layer.
By decoupling execution and storage, then scaling each individually, Subspace allows for a much wider array of layer two constructions, limited only by the protocol designers imagination.
Subspace began several years ago as an idea for a layer two network suitable for building decentralized applications at scale. Along the way we learned the fundamental problem in the crypto space lies in designing a fair and sustainable layer one that remains secure and decentralized. While inspired by many other projects, we ultimately felt that all existing and proposed solutions were inadequate. We've spent the last few years doing the hard work of researching and designing a novel protocol from scratch that lives up to these ideals.
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We'll update you on our project and let you know when we launch
