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“The People’s Coin” Spacemesh Launches Following Five Years of Research - Chainwire

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14Jul

“The People’s Coin” Spacemesh Launches Following Five Years of Research

Tel Aviv, israel, July 14th, 2023, Chainwire

Spacemesh is proud to announce today, that after five years of work, they will at long last be performing network genesis on July the 14th at 08.00 UTC.

Spacemesh chose the date of July 14th, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille, as the day to launch the People’s Coin. The goal is to establish a cryptocurrency that can achieve widespread distribution, particularly among younger generations and underprivileged demographics who are currently unable to participate in the cryptocurrency revolution due to insurmountable barriers to entry

Spacemesh, The People’s Coin, is born today.

Spacemesh’s team of cryptographers, led by Prof. Tal Moran, spent over 5 years building a radically novel way to achieve consensus in the permissionless setting from scratch.

  • Instead of the commonly-used PoW or PoStake, Spacemesh uses PoST (Proof of Space-Time)
  • Rather than a Chain topology (i.e., a blockchain), Spacemesh uses a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), a.k.a. a “mesh”
  • Additionally, rather than the winner-takes-all paradigm via Lottery (“Competitive Mining”) used by all Nakamoto-based consensus protocols, Spacemesh uses lottery-free, non-competitive “leaderless” voting (“Collaborative Mining”)
  • Lastly, instead of generating a new proof for every challenge, which is energy intensive, Spacemesh miners reuse the original proof continually—resulting in extremely low energy use and near-zero ongoing costs for operating a miner

The Spacemesh protocol ensures fairness for smaller home miners by rewarding them based on their storage commitment size during each epoch, which occurs approximately every two weeks. This prevents powerful miners, including adversarial ones, from receiving a disproportionate share of rewards. Spacemesh also has significantly lower barriers to entry compared to other permissionless cryptocurrencies. To become a miner (smesher), all that is required is a PC with available storage space, any GPU with OpenCL support, and a reliable internet connection. Specialized mining equipment is unnecessary, and ongoing power usage is low, resulting in minimal electricity bills. Additionally, there is no need for deposits, bank accounts, or credit cards.

The combination of low entry barriers, low operational costs, and incentive compatibility, establishes a novel guarantee of fair distribution.

Once a miner joins the network by committing the minimum required storage, they become an active participant and receive a fair share of rewards during each epoch. This share is likely sufficient to cover any electricity expenses or hardware replacement costs. The low marginal costs for home users, coupled with the absence of competition-based rewards, encourage small miners to join the network. This leads to a diverse ecosystem where even smaller participants can actively contribute without being priced out.

Regardless of how many other participants join the network, every miner is guaranteed to receive their fair share of rewards consistently and predictably. There are no more races for big payouts or reliance on luck through lotteries. 

“To reach its full revolutionary potential, crypto cannot be introduced as stocks, e.g. gamble money you don’t have, nor as an elites-only hobby. We must by necessity offer these users a better deal: Come as you are, with whatever PC you already own, and the know-how already have — no other out-of-pocket expenses are needed at any time. It’s the only conceivable way to have a widespread currency that impacts the people who need it most.” explains Tomer Afek, the co-founder and CEO of SpaceMesh.

“As the People’s Coin, everything we do, everything we write—the code and apps we ship—should be understandable, accessible, legible, and usable by regular people. This has profound implications for our design, UX, engineering, and economics.” he adds.

Spacemesh’s Team is dedicated to breaking down barriers that prevent the benefits of cryptocurrency from reaching more people. We are committed to continuously lowering entry barriers, ensuring that more diverse demographics can participate in the crypto revolution. Our goal is to create a more equitable world, fostering improved cooperation on local, national, and global scales. By making crypto accessible to all, we believe we can contribute to a future that is fairer and more inclusive for everyone.

About SpaceMesh:

Spacemesh raised $23m from leading cryptocurrency investors including Polychain, Paradigm, Dragonfly, Electric Capital, Greenfield, Arrington XRP Capital, and 1KX.