Spacemesh

Spacemesh is a layer-1 blockchain protocol operating as a decentralized smart contract platform and cryptocurrency, SMH ($SMH). Founded in 2017 in Israel by Tomer Afek, Aviv Eyal, and Rami Kasterstein, the project was conceived to address the centralization and high energy consumption issues prevalent in traditional Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) systems. Afek, the CEO, brings a background in computer science and analytical philosophy, driven by the goal of making cryptocurrency mining accessible to home users again after witnessing its industrialization. After five years of development, the Spacemesh mainnet went live on July 14, 2023.

The core of Spacemesh's architecture is its proprietary Proof of Space-Time (PoST) consensus mechanism. This protocol allows individuals, referred to as "Smeshers," to participate in securing the network by allocating unused hard drive space, a process called "Smeshing". Unlike PoW, which requires intensive computational power, or PoS, which necessitates capital investment, PoST leverages underutilized storage, significantly lowering the barrier to entry and energy consumption. Participants need a minimum of 256 GiB of disk space to start Smeshing and are guaranteed a share of rewards proportional to their allocated storage, eliminating the competitive, race-based nature of mining found in other protocols. The protocol uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, known as a blockmesh, which allows for multiple blocks to be processed in parallel, aiming to support thousands of transactions per second.

The company's business model is centered on the native coin, $SMH, which is awarded to Smeshers for their participation in validating transactions and securing the network. Spacemesh has successfully raised a total of $18 million in two funding rounds. A seed round in May 2018 brought in $3 million from investors including BRM Group and iAngels. This was followed by a $15 million Series A round in September 2018, led by Polychain and including notable investors like Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and Bain Capital. The tokenomics design specifies that 93.75% of the total 2.4 billion SMH supply is minted over time as block rewards, with the remaining 6.25% reserved for the team and investors, subject to a vesting schedule.

Keywords: Spacemesh, Proof of Space-Time (PoST), SMH, cryptocurrency mining, decentralized platform, layer-1 blockchain, Smeshing, blockmesh, DAG, Tomer Afek, Aviv Eyal, home mining, low-energy crypto, fair mining, smart contracts, Polychain, Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm, blockchain protocol, crypto accessibility, storage-based consensus