Subspace is a new L1 powered by proof-of-archival-storage (PoAS) consensus, comprising proofs of storing the blockchain history itself. PoAS resolves several incentive challenges that lead to centralization in proof-of-space blockchains like Chia or Filecoin. In Subspace, farmers (not miners) store as many unique segments of the blockchain history as their disk space allows. Since this consensus is based on storage, it is eco-friendly and accessible to anyone with available hard disk space.
PoAS consensus also allows Subspace to provide permanent decentralized storage for protocol and application developers at a previously unimaginable scale. This is possible because farmers store the blockchain history collectively, allowing them to operate as a single distributed archival node. Data may be permanently stored on the network by simply embedding it within a Subspace storage transaction and later retrieving it from the farmer network. As more farmers join, network capacity grows, and storage costs go down.
Subspace is based on several years of original R&D funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Web3 Foundation. Subspace is implemented in Rust, using the Substrate framework and LibP2P, both of which we have extended extensively. We have an active testnet which has seen participation from over 25,000 independent node operators from around the world.
Technical Whitepaper — Subspace: A Solution to the Farmer’s Dilemma
Formal Consensus Specification (v1) — v2 is coming soon!
Consensus Article Series — Web3 Grant Medium Blog (3 parts)
Archiving Dotsama — Parity Blog Post
Technical Overview — Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup
Consensus Security — Stanford Blockchain Seminar
Execution Scalability — WASM Conference