Subspace: Solving the Farmer’s Dilemma in PoC Networks
Subspace Network is a decentralized PoC (Proofs-of-Capacity) network that solves the "impossible triangle" of blockchain by optimizing the PoC algorithm. It is committed to growing into a low-energy storage public chain with continuously scalable TPS that takes into account security, scalability and decentralization.
Compared with traditional mining methods that are highly dependent on computing, the design of the PoC consensus mechanism reduces energy consumption and improves fairness and decentralization. However, the past PoC design has made farmers tend to maximize the use of storage space rather than maintain chain status and historical records. For example, PoC networks represented by Filecoin and Chia are more inclined to centralized collective mining, resulting in obvious oligopoly and monopoly effects, thus affecting the security and decentralization of the network.
To solve this problem, Subspace introduced a Proofs-of-Storage mechanism, where Farmers collectively store the history of the blockchain, and each Farmer stores as many copies as possible based on its disk space. At the same time, consensus is separated from computation, so that Farmers are only responsible for transaction sorting, and dedicated execution nodes are responsible for maintaining status and computing transactions. This design reduces the storage and computational burden of Farmers, ensures efficient recovery and retrieval of historical records, and maintains the economic sustainability of the network through a dynamically adjusted transaction fee mechanism. Subspace's optimized architectural design provides a solid foundation for decentralized applications and storage.
team
Subspace Labs is an internationally distributed team whose members have work experience from Dapper Labs/Flow, Restream, Protocol Labs, GitHub, Stanford, etc.
Among them, Jeremiah Wagstaff is the co-founder of Subspace and he graduated from Texas A&M University in the United States.
Nazar Mokrynskyi is the Chief Software Development Engineer at Restream, a protocol developer at Subspace Labs, and an open source enthusiast. Previously, he founded Ecoisme and served as its CTO. He is an active contributor to many open source projects, including jQuery, Linux Kernel, HHVM, Polymer, WebComponents.js, UIkit, ownCoud, fabric.js, SimpleImage, HybridAuth, Plupload, PulseAudio, TinyMCE, WebTorrent, Emscripten, lodash, Cerebro, Budgie Desktop, Redux, etc.
Financing
Subspace Labs was founded in 2018 and was initially funded by the National Science Foundation and the Web3 Foundation;
In 2021, it completed a $4.5 million seed round of financing;
In 2022, it completed a strategic financing of US$32.9 million with a valuation of US$600 million, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from many well-known investment institutions such as Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com, Alameda Research, ConsenSys Mesh, KR1, Hypersphere Ventures, Stratos Technologies, AVG Blockchain Fund, GSR Ventures and Eniac Ventures.
https://www.rootdata.com/zh/Projects/detail/Subspace%20Network?k=NDc5Ng%3D%3D
A better blockchain solution: What problems does Subspace solve?
The design of the Subspace protocol fundamentally solves several important issues in the blockchain industry and has its significant advantages and characteristics.
Eliminating blockchain bloat
Blockchain bloat refers to the phenomenon that blockchains become increasingly centralized over time, especially during expansion. Each full node must store the entire transaction history and execution status of the chain, resulting in an increased storage burden.
Subspace uniquely combines the strengths of Ethereum, Filecoin, and Chia to develop a storage-based consensus protocol, permanent distributed storage services, and a scalable off-chain execution framework to solve the blockchain expansion problem.
Solving state bloat
State expansion refers to the fact that as the state data on the blockchain increases, the storage requirements of full nodes continue to increase.
Subspace introduces a decoupled execution framework (DeCEx), in which farmers only confirm the availability of transactions and provide ordering, while the staking execution nodes of the secondary network execute transactions and maintain the chain state. This separation allows different node types to have different hardware requirements, making Farming lightweight and providing a basis for vertical and horizontal expansion of execution.
Expanding block space
The overall execution throughput of a blockchain is limited by the blockspace bandwidth, i.e. the amount of blockchain space that can run code or store data.
Subspace achieves optimal scalability through Orthogonal Execution (OE). OE first horizontally scales the block space of the base data availability layer, and then vertically scales the transaction throughput of each domain. This approach combines some ideas from Stanford University's Tse Lab, including the Prism protocol for vertical scaling, the Free2Shard protocol for horizontal scaling, the Semi-AVID-PR scheme for distributed data availability, and the Ebb-and-Flow protocol for flexible finality.
Aligning incentives for optimal scalability
Subspace introduces a novel algorithm that dynamically adjusts the cost of block space based on changes in supply and demand to economically secure the network in an open environment. This adjustment mechanism ensures that the incentives of Farmers (data storage providers) and Operators (computing power providers) are compatible, facilitating the provision of storage and data availability bandwidth.
Subspace has created the first bilateral blockspace market: on one hand, farmers provide blockspace bandwidth by storing blockchain history data; on the other hand, dApp developers and users need blockspace to deploy and run their applications. Subspace's market algorithm adjusts the blockspace cost obtained by farmers based on real-time supply and demand. When demand is high, the cost rises, incentivizing more farmers to join; when demand is low, the cost falls, preventing over-investment in storage. This dynamic adjustment process is transparently carried out on-chain through protocol rules.
Detailed explanation of Subspace technical architecture
Overview
Subspace is a modular blockchain network divided into a base-layer consensus chain (core protocol) and a virtually unlimited number of secondary execution chains (domains). The core protocol is responsible for consensus, data availability, and settlement of transaction packages, while the domains are responsible for execution, supporting a variety of state transition frameworks and smart contract execution environments. The Subspace system includes a consensus layer, domains, a distributed storage network, client applications, and development tools, providing an open, scalable, and interoperable blockchain infrastructure for future decentralized applications and services.
https://subnomicon.subspace.network/docs/overview/
1/ Permissionless peer-to-peer network
Subspace is a permissionless peer-to-peer network where any node can act as a Farmer to store data and propose new blocks, or as an Operator to execute transactions. Nodes with different roles communicate and exchange data through the network, ensuring the decentralization of the system and data availability.
2/ Consensus Layer
The consensus layer is the foundation of the Subspace network and is responsible for reaching consensus among all nodes to ensure the uniqueness of the blockchain state and the immutability of historical data. Through the Dilithium storage proof protocol, the consensus layer guarantees the availability of data and distributes blockchain data among all farmers through the distributed storage network (DSN), ensuring load balancing, fault tolerance, and efficient retrieval of data.
3/ Decouple the execution layer
The Subspace network decouples consensus and computation by separating transaction execution into independent domains. This design allows for parallelization, optimization, and even sharding of the execution process, improving scalability. Domains are run by Operators, who execute transactions within the domain by staking hardware and collateral and receive execution fees (similar to Ethereum's gas fees).
Each domain can support any state transition framework and remain neutral to the execution environment. For example, the first execution domain Nova supports running Ethereum smart contracts and transactions, allowing Ethereum dApps and DeFi protocols to have higher throughput, lower costs, and better scalability when running on Subspace.
4/ Application layer
The application layer is the interface for dApps to interact with the blockchain. dApps can send contract calls, which will be executed in the flexible decoupled execution layer. Developers can build and deploy applications without paying attention to the underlying execution and consensus details, which greatly simplifies the development process.
Transaction process
1/ User submits transaction: The user submits the execution transaction directly to the Operator.
2/ Operator pre-verification and packaging: Operator pre-verifies transactions and packages them into transaction packages through the staking election process.
3/ Farmer confirmation and sorting: Farmer verifies the election proof and ensures data availability, packages the transaction packages into blocks, and performs deterministic sorting through a secure cryptographic shuffle algorithm based on PoAS. This process helps mitigate the impact of miner extractable value (MEV).
4/ Operator executes transactions: Operator executes transactions according to the order and generates a deterministic state commitment (execution receipt).
5/ Farmers record states: These state commitments are included in subsequent transaction packages, forming a deterministic receipt chain tracked by all farmers.
Subspace's transaction execution process achieves efficient and secure transaction processing and state maintenance by decoupling the execution framework. Its unique design not only improves the scalability of the network and the low threshold for participation, but also provides a powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications by flexibly supporting multiple execution environments.
Innovative consensus mechanism
Dilithium consensus structure, operation and advantages
The Subspace network is powered by a lightweight and secure consensus mechanism called Dilithium. Dilithium is an environmentally friendly, permissionless and fair consensus protocol based on the Proof-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS) mechanism for storing blockchain history.
https://subnomicon.subspace.network/docs/decex/overview
Composition of Dilithium
Dilithium is a second-generation PoAS consensus algorithm that combines multiple advanced technologies, including erasure coding and KZG commitment, for distributed archiving. At the same time, it also combines multiple technologies:
1/ Polynomial encoding: used for data storage and verification.
2/ ASIC-resistant storage proof: ensures the decentralization and fairness of the system.
3/ AES-based proof of time: used to draw and extract block challenges.
This set of protocols is designed to improve the security and user experience of the Subspace network and is friendly to solid-state drives (SSDs), further improving energy efficiency and decentralization.
How Dilithium works
The core of the Dilithium consensus mechanism lies in three stages: Archiving, Plotting, and Farming.
1/ Archiving phase
During the archiving phase, all nodes prepare blockchain history data for Subspace’s drawing protocol. This process includes:
Error Correction Coding: Uses Reed-Solomon coding to ensure that even if some data blocks are not stored by any farmer, they can still be recovered through other data blocks.
Commitment scheme: Using a specific type of polynomial commitment makes it easier for farmers to prove that they have stored certain historical data during the farming phase.
2/ Drawing phase
During the drawing phase, farmers will create their own unique storage graph. This process is divided into two steps:
Select historical data blocks: Farmer selects the blockchain historical data blocks to be stored based on a deterministic algorithm to ensure even data distribution and reduce the possibility of data missing.
Masked data block: By generating unique and verifiable masked data, each farmer’s stored data is guaranteed to be unique, preventing cheaters from sharing the same original data.
3/ Farming
During the Farming phase, farmers check the stored blockchain history to determine if they are eligible to generate a block. When a farmer wins a challenge and generates a block, they need to present both the original data and the masked data. These challenges are drawn from a secure random beacon that is updated every second, and the randomness of the beacon is provided by the time proof component embedded in the blockchain history.
Dilithium Advantages and Features
As an advanced PoAS consensus mechanism, Dilithium has the following significant advantages and features:
Environmentally friendly and energy-saving: Based on storage rather than computing power or wealth, it reduces energy consumption and has extremely high energy efficiency.
Decentralization: Utilizes widely distributed disk space resources to avoid the problem of computing power concentration under the traditional PoW mechanism.
High security: Combining multiple technical means to improve the system's anti-attack capabilities and the reliability of data storage.
Fairness: Allowing ordinary people to participate through idle disk space without expensive hardware investment, thus lowering the threshold for participation.
The Dilithium consensus mechanism implements the ideas in the original white paper in a more optimized way, bringing better security, decentralization, and user-friendliness to the Subspace network.
Comparative Analysis of Storage Track
As a PoC public chain, Subspace has unique advantages and characteristics compared to other storage projects such as Spacemesh and AO.
Subspace adopts a modular and open architecture, separating consensus from transaction execution by storing useful blockchain historical data and decoupling the execution model. Its consensus mechanism allows farmers to obtain block production rights based on the proportion of storage capacity, and has strong decentralization capabilities. Subspace supports application-specific blockchains through domains, solves the problem of data expansion, ensures data integrity and availability, and provides broad market potential for a variety of applications such as decentralized identity (DID), decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and virtual economy.
Spacemesh adopts the PoST consensus mechanism, which mainly stores useless data to verify storage space commitments. Its architecture is simple, the participation threshold is low, and it is easy to form a mining pool. However, due to the lack of practical application value of the stored data, Spacemesh has limited competitiveness in the decentralized storage market.
AO is built on Arweave and uses an Actor Oriented architecture to achieve parallel computing. Its model supports high concurrent processing capabilities and is mainly used in low-trust application scenarios such as instant messaging (IM). However, AO faces challenges in ensuring transaction order and global consistency, and its market applications are mainly concentrated in areas that do not require strong trust. With further development of technology, AO may show potential in more application scenarios.
From Subspace to Autonomy: Upgrades and Prospects
On June 15, Subspace Network underwent an important brand upgrade and was officially renamed Autonomys Network. This progress is in line with the development progress of its roadmap planning and is a comprehensive evolution in technology and vision.
https://blog.subspace.network/becoming-autonomys-new-vision-new-ceo-new-mainnet-launch-date-baa8accc1a76
Subspace initially focused on solving the "impossible triangle" in blockchain, and achieved a decentralized storage public chain with low energy consumption, high security and scalability by optimizing the PoC algorithm. With the advancement of technology and changes in market demand, Subspace began to develop towards a broader decentralized AI (deAI) ecosystem, integrating distributed storage, distributed computing and decentralized application (dApp) suites, and eventually formed a new brand, Autonomys Network.
Autonomys Network is committed to becoming the infrastructure layer for the convergence of AI and Web3, driving the collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence into the era of autonomy. The new brand not only reflects the technological evolution of the network, but also emphasizes Autonomys' innovation in decentralized identity (DID) and AI Agents.
Autonomy’s Technical Architecture
1/ Consensus Mechanism
Proof-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS): Farmers in the community contribute storage to ensure the security of the blockchain and receive rewards.
Proof-of-Stake (PoS): Node operators provide computing power (execution) and earn rewards through the Proof-of-Stake mechanism.
2/ Layered Architecture
Distributed storage: ensures data integrity and availability, suitable for storing large amounts of AI-related data.
Distributed computing: Provides scalable and secure computing resources for AI training and inference.
dApp/Agent Layer: Deploy and develop AI dApps and agents, integrating Autonomys ID (Auto ID) for secure and verifiable interactions.
Autonomys Network solves several key problems in the blockchain and decentralized AI space. Its core component, Autonomys ID (Auto ID), provides privacy-preserving decentralized identity verification, allowing humans and AI agents to seamlessly establish and verify identities. Users can prove their humanity and create a unique identity on-chain without the need for invasive biometric scans. In addition, Auto ID establishes a system of trust and responsibility by assigning human-controlled identities to AI agents, ensuring that AI agents follow human-defined safety and ethical boundaries.
In terms of control and rights management, users can control the permissions of AI agents and conduct complex transactions within the rules framework. At the same time, users can authenticate AI-generated content, ensure the traceability of generated content, and maintain control over their own and their agents’ digital footprints.
latest progress
While upgrading its brand, Autonomys has also made major adjustments to its team composition. Labhesh Patel is the new CEO, who has extensive experience in AI, Web3, and identity and access management (IAM) and will continue to lead Autonomys to advance the development of AI3.0 and Auto ID protocols. Former CEO Jeremiah Wagstaff and co-founder Nazar Mokrynskyi will continue to provide guidance in R&D to solve further expansion and AI integration challenges.
In order to expand the community and ecosystem, Autonomys Network is encouraging the community to actively participate in further testing and improving its network through its testnet Gemini 3 and the upcoming Stake Wars 2 event. At the same time, Autonomys is planning to attract developers to build dApps on its decoupled execution environment Nova EVM through various incentive policies to enrich its ecosystem. These measures will help Autonomys continuously improve its technology and ecosystem and promote the integration of decentralization and AI technology.
Conclusion
Subspace solves multiple key issues in the blockchain industry through its unique technical architecture and innovative consensus mechanism. Compared with other storage projects such as Spacemesh and AO, Subspace shows significant advantages in data storage, market application, and scalability. Subspace separates consensus from transaction execution by storing useful blockchain historical data and decoupling execution models, ensuring the efficiency, security, and decentralization of the system.
Subspace's infrastructure, especially its powerful distributed storage and computing capabilities, is very suitable for the development of AI-related businesses and provides a solid foundation for the integration of AI technology and blockchain technology. Based on this, Subspace continues its roadmap planning while adapting to market demand and growing into a new brand, Autonomys Network. This upgrade is an important step for Subspace to evolve from an underlying basic protocol focused on storage and computing to a broader decentralized AI ecosystem. Looking ahead, Autonomys Network will continue to be committed to the mission of promoting AI 3.0 and use its technological advantages to promote the development of a decentralized AI ecosystem.