Subspace Labs, a distributed research and development company behind the Subspace network, today announced the appointment of Dr. David Tse to its advisory board. Tse, who is also a distinguished professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, brings extensive expertise as a leading researcher in the areas of blockchain scalability, security and sustainability.
A scalable platform for storage and compute, the subspace network is designed to completely solve the blockchain trilemma.
Having already incorporated many of Dr. Tse’s ideas into the design of the subspace network, Subspace Labs will now work with him more directly to properly implement key elements of his research.
The blockchain trilemma is a term coined by Vitalik Buterin to describe the challenge of creating a scalable, decentralized, and secure blockchain, claiming that only two of these three features can realistically be achieved. Subspace provides a solution to this problem by combining its own new consensus algorithm with a host of cutting-edge academic proposals co-authored by Dr. Tse, which help maximize vertical and horizontal scalability without compromising security or decentralization.
“It is such a privilege to work with such a brilliant researcher as David; we are delighted to have personally involved him in the application of his ideas, ”said Jeremiah Wagstaff, co-founder and CEO of Subspace Labs. “Since the audit of David’s graduate course on blockchain scaling last year, much of his research has been incorporated into Subspace, we can now be sure that he is correctly implemented. “
“While Subspace is an interesting protocol in itself, it was even more exciting to see how they have adapted and extended the body of work to which I have contributed,” said Dr David Tse. “I look forward to collaborating more closely to help realize the dream of a secure, scalable and decentralized blockchain! “
Subspace Labs was founded in 2018 by Wagstaff and Nazar Mokrynskyi with a common vision of creating a scalable base layer for the Web3, where users can control their data and where the Internet can operate without relying on centralized servers or centers. data controlled by technology monopolies. Wagstaff and Mokrynskyi set out to create a platform that would allow anyone to easily build decentralized applications at scale.
After years of research, largely funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation of the United States, Subspace Labs raised a funding round of $ 4.5 million in June 2021 led by Hypersphere Ventures and Stratos Technologies. Currently, the Subspace blockchain is under development and is built with Parity Substrate, the same framework used to build Polkadot. A first version was funded by a grant from the Web3 Foundation.
Consensus in Subspace is based on storage capacity. Farmers (not miners) store as many provably unique segments of blockchain history as their disk space allows thanks to Proofs-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS), a new consensus algorithm described in their white paper. technical.
PoAS is uniquely designed to solve the Farmer’s Dilemma, a mechanism design challenge that limits the scalability of Proof-of-Space blockchains like Chia or Filecoin. As agriculture is storage-based, it is environmentally friendly and accessible to anyone with a hard drive. Subspace further organizes farmers into a permanent distributed storage service, inspired by the BitTorrent network, which allows the Subspace blockchain to massively inflate without sacrificing decentralization.
Solve the trilemma
Dr Tse’s research solves a key aspect of the blockchain trilemma by enabling secure scaling with decentralized participation in consensus, but it ignores the problem of decentralized storage and synchronization of the history of blockchain, often referred to as blockchain bloat.
This issue emerged as a central issue during the Bitcoin Civil War and is one of the main reasons Ethereum has since resisted attempts to increase the throughput of on-chain transactions. Since Subspace’s PoAS consensus is already handling blockchain bloat, when combined with Dr. Tse’s research, this is the first protocol capable of completely solving the blockchain trilemma.
Subspace is a zero layer protocol interoperable with any layer one, allowing it to serve as an infrastructure layer for the Web3 ecosystem. Based on years of original R&D, Subspace aims to be the first protocol to solve the blockchain trilemma, providing an open and scalable platform for storage and compute.
Currently, Subspace supports Polkadot and Kusama, with more networks to come.
