Spacemesh Turns One 🎂
Three Things #128: July 14, 2024
It's hard to believe it's been a year since we launched the Spacemesh mainnet last summer. Reflecting on this past year, it's been the most transformative period for both the team and the network. We've hit some remarkable milestones and managed to keep the network running smoothly despite numerous technical and other challenges.
I wrote a Spacemesh Genesis Special Edition a year ago when the network went live so it only seems appropriate to celebrate the one year mark in similar fashion.
Thing #1: The Good 👌
"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time." - Leonard Bernstein
Let's start with the positives because there's plenty to celebrate! The biggest win: the network survived the year without any significant downtime. It's easy to brush this off with, "Well, that's what blockchains are supposed to do," but considering how young our network and protocol are, this is a huge achievement.
We've faced numerous growing pains. The rapid network growth has been both a blessing and a challenge, putting immense strain on the network and its nodes. There are more mature protocols with vastly greater resources that have experienced downtime, so this is no small feat for a small team and a young chain. Spacemesh had less downtime than Ethereum or Solana did in their first year.
This resilience speaks volumes about the Spacemesh team. I've praised them before, but it's worth reiterating: this is the best team I've ever worked with. They've worked tirelessly to keep the network alive and healthy, constantly improving the software and fighting fires along the way. That kind of dedication, focus, and energy is worth celebrating.
Our community is another highlight. It's extremely active, vibrant, and healthy. I smile every time I open our Discord and see the funny, insightful comments from our members. This community developed organically, not through airdrops or expensive, cringe marketing. It grew naturally from home hobbyist miners and has stuck with us through thick and thin. The community is values-aligned and thinking long-term, just like we are. It has developed its own language and memes, a true sign of a healthy, thriving, sustainable community—something money can’t buy and shortcuts can’t achieve.
And let's not forget the technology. Yes, Spacemesh is still alpha software. Yes, there are bugs. Yes, there's a lot we need to improve. But it's come a long way since launch. Running a Spacemesh node today is nothing like it was a year ago. It's still not as easy as it should be, but it's a lot easier than it was.
The database is smaller and more efficient. The networking stack is better. The logs display useful information. We have multiple working wallets and a functioning explorer and dashboard. We've fixed bugs, massively reduced resource consumption, and shipped significant features like 1-to-n and the post service. Most excitingly, we've made great progress toward big upgrades like PoST merge and the Athena VM.
And we've proven that the Spacemesh protocol works in production and is reasonably secure and stable. A year ago, neither of those things were certain.
Thing #2: The Bad 😕
"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction." - Pablo Picasso
I often write about the challenges Spacemesh faces, so if you’re a regular reader, you’ll be familiar with these points. Our biggest challenge today is the sheer number of miner identities and the associated data load on the network. Running a node is far too demanding, requiring too much bandwidth and compute. Since genesis, the growth in miner identities has been explosive, putting immense strain on the network and nodes. We've been struggling to manage all the traffic and data, barely keeping up.
But the issue goes deeper than just identities and data. As I wrote last week, there are fundamental flaws in the protocol’s design and implementation that cause miners to split into many identities. Addressing these will take time.
Keeping the network alive feels like nearly drowning and struggling to stay afloat for a long, long time: a sprint that turned into a marathon. The struggles began long before genesis and have continued throughout the past year. We’ve been fighting fires constantly, with just enough energy to tackle only the biggest, most imminent threats. This has led to exhaustion and burnout on the team. As a builder, being in firefighting mode isn’t fun because it means you can’t zoom out and plan long term, which is what I love to do.
Burnout aside, the constant sprinting means we haven’t been able to improve the software as much as we’d like. We have a laundry list of improvements, and the community often complains about these things, but we’ve only been able to focus on the highest priority items. This means “important” (but not “critical”) tasks, like quality of life improvements to the mining experience, API enhancements, and better documentation, haven’t gotten much attention. In firefighting mode, you don’t get to build features that make users happy because you’re too busy fixing things you already built.
Another big challenge is pools, as we wrote about recently. Pools are an inevitable result of economies of scale, and we can’t prevent them from forming. I feel strongly that fighting pools would be a mistake. There will always be miners who prefer to join a pool for various reasons, and they should be able to do so. However, pools are less than ideal from a decentralization perspective. The Spacemesh network is currently dominated by a single pool, and while the pool operator has thus far been a good actor, this presents certain risks from a decentralization perspective. There’s no easy solution to this problem. Developing competing pools will take time.
Other areas of the Spacemesh network and protocol aren’t as decentralized as I’d like. We’ve had issues with our random beacon protocol, which has been disabled for a while, so we generate beacon values manually. We do something similar with the set of known, eligible miners every epoch. There’s a lot we can do to increase decentralization in protocol governance, the software supply chain, and other areas. All of these will take time too.
The good news is that we more or less know how to solve all these issues, and we’re working on solutions. When I write a second anniversary update a year from now, I’m optimistic that most or all of these issues will be behind us!
Thing #3: The Unchanging ♾️
"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In a typical “good, bad, ugly” list, the "ugly" part usually highlights the bad stuff that isn't likely to change—the annoying things you're stuck with. We definitely have some of these at Spacemesh because life is full of choices and tradeoffs. But ending on an “ugly” list feels pessimistic and defeatist. Instead, let’s focus on the “permanents” of Spacemesh: the things we won’t compromise on, both good and bad. They’re two sides of the same coin.
The biggest and most obvious constant is our commitment to decentralization as a core value and operating principle. I never expected decentralization to be easy, but this past year has shown me it’s much harder than I ever imagined. It’s like privacy or freedom—something you must constantly fight for. It’s a fight that never really ends, because there are always forces working against you. And you need to fight for it long before you need it because once you do, it’s already too late.
The upside here is that you can count on Spacemesh always standing on the side of freedom, privacy, and decentralization as long as we’re around. The downside is that there’s a price to pay for this. As I discussed last week, there’s a first-order cost in terms of complexity and efficiency: the most efficient blockchain is a centralized database. Decentralized networks will never be as performant or efficient as centralized systems. It may be harder to run a node, join the network, sync the data, and mine compared to a more orderly, centralized network. Spacemesh might not be as user-friendly as other blockchains, at least for a while. That’s a price we’re willing to pay. Spacemesh probably won’t have Solana-level throughput or super-fast blocks, but we aim for orders of magnitude more decentralization.
Our commitment to decentralization also shapes our governance and decision-making. We’re simply unwilling to appoint a “benevolent dictator for life” to make decisions centrally. This means some decisions will take longer than they would in a typical startup with a strong CEO or a community with a cult of personality. But it also means that the decisions we reach will be better because they’re the result of a messy governance process that ensures many voices are heard.
Lastly, there’s our unwavering commitment to long-term thinking. People ask me all the time when Spacemesh will do an airdrop, turn on the hypebeast marketing engine, or why we have no premine and don’t speed up coin issuance. These things might make sense for other projects; they don’t make sense for Spacemesh. The main reason is that we’re thinking very long term. We’re playing an infinite game. We’re still in the top of the first inning, for the baseball fans out there. This means there’s plenty of time—decades, if not centuries—for people who haven’t even been born yet to join, contribute, and earn value from the Spacemesh ecosystem. I constantly remind myself that the most important Spacemesh contributors probably haven’t even been born yet!
In an industry dominated by short-term profiteering, it’s tough for people to understand why we’re so committed to long-term thinking. It’s just how we’re made. It’s another core value, alongside decentralization. The upside is that we’re leaving plenty of value on the table for future generations of Spacemesh community members. The downside is that Spacemesh will continue to be unintelligible to short-term profit maximizooors. I’m okay with that. It’s by design; it’s a memetic filter. Short-term thinkers need not apply; Spacemesh isn’t for you.
We put our values into practice in Spacemesh, weaving them into our code. We believe the world would be better if people thought and acted long-term, if governance and decision-making were more transparent and participatory, and if society were built on more decentralized, censorship-resistant, permissionless institutions. We’re building a little piece of that future every day, and you’re welcome to join us—but know that this decision comes with tradeoffs!
What would you like to see Spacemesh focus on in its second year? When I write a second-anniversary summary a year from now, what should I be writing about? Let me know!
Congrats buddy!