The Secret of Spacemesh
Three Things #79: July 30, 2023
Spacemesh finally launched a few days ago and it’s been an exciting few days to say the least. Community members are still initializing their storage, the PoET server is counting elapsed time, and we’re all anxiously awaiting the moment the network beings producing blocks and issuing coins in a few more days.
Lots of people came up to say hi and congratulations during EthCC week in Paris. I was very surprised by how many people are aware of Spacemesh. The fact that it’s sort of a word-of-mouth, low-key project seems to appeal to industry insiders, as if the only people that are aware of Spacemesh are those who “need to know.” This wasn’t totally intentional but nor was it unintentional. People get that Spacemesh is quite different but they can’t put their finger on precisely why or how.
To some people this is an obvious sign that Spacemesh isn’t a legitimate project and that it’s destined to fail. But others who are keener observers, who see and understand nuance, and especially those that understand hacker and cypherpunk values understand that Spacemesh has done a good job of standing out and differentiating itself in a very crowded space that quite frankly is full of copycats, garbage, and scams.
Upon first joining Spacemesh four years ago I wrote a series of articles describing my vision for what a better blockchain could look like, including critical (and often overlooked) areas like community and values. I’m really excited to report that now, four years later and after an enormous amount of sweat and toil, the Spacemesh network is alive and, hopefully, better along some of these lines.
A number of people have asked me, What’s going on? What are you guys up to? Why are you so different, so weird? What’s the secret? This is my response.
Thing #1: Lead With Values
“Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.” - Gandhi
The single most important thing about Spacemesh, as a project and as a team, is also the least remarkable: we’re extraordinarily values-driven. More or less everyone in the world says this—every company no matter how ruthless or unethical has a values statement and if you ask someone if they’re values-driven, 99% would say yes—but in my experience only a tiny, tiny minority of people and organizations are truly values-driven.
Spacemesh is truly values-driven. It motivates literally everything that we do. It’s a huge factor in our hiring process, probably the biggest factor: values alignment is even more important than ability. Hiring for values isn’t easy and we made a lot of mistakes along the way, but the incredible team we have in place today is the most values-aligned team I’ve ever worked with. It motivates our team dynamic. It motivates our internal decisions, such as how we hire people and how and when we let them go, and it motivates the software and systems we build, such as the longest, most gradual issuance schedule and smallest reservation of coins for early contributors of any blockchain to launch since Bitcoin.
What are our values? For one, we question everything. We’re relentlessly curious and thorough. Like the cypherpunks that paved the way for us we do our homework, we don’t unquestioningly respect authority, and we foster a healthy culture of dissent. We respectfully debate just about everything, and everyone in the project regardless of team, role, or seniority has an equal voice. This also manifests in a very flat team without titles. The obvious downside is that it takes a bit longer to make decisions and align everyone behind them, but the upside is that, when we do make decisions and move forward, we do so confidently, and the decisions we do make are by and large very good ones.
Secondly, we’re compassionate towards team members, the community, and humanity at large. The Spacemesh project isn’t primarily about business, it isn’t primarily about making money, it’s primarily about moving humanity forward, putting a dent in the universe. It’s about always doing the right thing for humanity over the long run even if that’s difficult or comes at the expense of short term profit.
Thirdly, we’re patient. Good things take time to build correctly and we’re not in a hurry. The human problems Spacemesh is trying to solve are universal, timeless problems that are as old as human civilization itself. We’re playing a very long game, an infinite game even. We’ll always choose the slow, correct route over the short, easy route. We know that later generations will thank us.
Fourthly, we act with integrity and authenticity. We’re only able to be our true selves, and our true selves are always on display. There’s no other side to us and there’s no other side to Spacemesh. We speak honestly about ourselves, about what we’re building and why, about our achievements and about our failures. There’s no “marketing spin” or “approved party line” about Spacemesh (see third thing). If you ask ten team members the same question about Spacemesh you’re likely to get ten different answers because we’re all individuals and we’ll all be brutally honest about the good, the bad, and the ugly.
These are the biggest, most important values by my interpretation, but of course we have others as well, including fun, humility, creativity and innovation, openness, fairness, security, and privacy. For another interpretation see Spacemesh Vision and Core Values. For more on the importance of values in blockchain and technology more generally, see The key ingredients to a better blockchain, Part IV: Constitution.
Thing #2: Community, Community, Community
“DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!” - Steve Ballmer
After the protocol and core technology, what’s the most important thing in Spacemesh? (All together now!) “COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY!” Most companies and even most blockchain projects use the word “community” as a euphemism for “customers.” Just as every major company has a dumb values statement they rarely live up to, every big tech company in the world abuses the term community: there’s a “Facebook community,” an “Uber community,” a “Microsoft community,” etc.. These companies misuse this term as a form of manipulative marketing, in an attempt to gaslight their customers into thinking they’re part of something bigger than themselves: that they’re part of a movement that’s inclusive, open, and democratic, when none of those things are true. I personally find this misuse of the term offensive. A community is more than a group of people who use a particular product or service, and a group of customers beholden to a centralized company that isn’t meaningfully accountable to its customers is definitely not a community. But what is a community, really?
A community is really a group of people that are excited, even passionate, about what you’re building. It’s a group of people that contribute to something even without tangible rewards for doing so, for the sake of intangible rewards and to support the overall community. But it’s more than that. Members of a true community also have to have some degree of affinity for and feel invested or enfranchised by the platform underlying the community: in other words, they need to feel a sense of ownership and pride for a thing, at least a little bit.
The Spacemesh community is remarkable and I have a great deal of love for it, especially for the miners and others who have been patiently with us literally for years as we built and tested and eventually launched the network. I’ve spent meaningful time in at least five or six blockchain communities over the years and I can say with confidence that the Spacemesh community is unlike any other. There’s no shilling, no spam, no discussion of price or markets. There’s a focus on tech, good economics, and social causes, and there are active channels dedicated to art, economics, and philosophy. Our community isn’t huge but it’s solid in size, very high in quality, and growing steadily. Most importantly our community is healthy and sustainable. That’s no small feat.
We consider the community’s preferences in literally everything that we do. We’re not building Spacemesh just for ourselves, we’re building it for our like-minded community, today and into the future. So the community’s needs, concerns, preferences, and feedback are primary.
We’ve done our best to enfranchise them throughout the design, building, and testing process—which has admittedly been very difficult given the scope and complexity of the project—and we’ll rely on them for more and more as Spacemesh grows. It’s a bit odd to say that you trust a group of strangers you mostly haven’t met, but I do trust our community. Eventually, the direction and governance of the entire Spacemesh project will be handed over to the community. If I’ve learned one thing from my time in this industry it’s that decentralized, community-led governance is really hard, doubly so for something the size and scope of Spacemesh. It won’t happen overnight, but it will eventually happen and I’m excited about the prospect.
For more on the importance of community in blockchain, see The key ingredients to a better blockchain, Part III: Community.
Thing #3: Speak Through Code
“Cypherpunks write code” - Eric Hughes
I had a conversation about Spacemesh with the well known CEO of a large, successful blockchain company recently. He asked me, “What’s your go to market? Who are you targeting? What use case are you aiming for?” These are some of the most common questions I get about Spacemesh, and also the most annoying.
I told him that Spacemesh is a general purpose platform that developers can build anything on top of, so we don’t have any one specific use case in mind. And I told him that our “go to market” is simply to let people around the world mine their own coins from home, which we predict will lead to an IKEA effect whereby they’ll feel strongly invested in the network, more than in existing blockchains, and will thus advocate for it and want to build on top of it.
He wasn’t at all satisfied with my answers. In his world, “successful” blockchains raise $100M or more, splash out on huge, noisy marketing campaigns, endorsements, and partnerships, and target specific applications like DeFi, NFTs, or gaming. Needless to say, Spacemesh isn’t any of those things. That’s okay: Spacemesh isn’t for everyone, at least not yet.
Another common question is, “Why haven’t I heard of it? Where’s your marketing?” (Actually, as I already said, I’m pleasantly surprised by how many people have heard of Spacemesh, but those tend to be industry insiders who know it through word of mouth.) The simple answer is that we don’t do marketing, at least not in the traditional sense. We don’t have a marketing team—we have a community team (see previous thing). Our strong belief is that we should build the best technology that we can and the technology should speak for itself.
Also, as I said above, we’re not in a hurry for Spacemesh to grow. People will learn about it when they learn about it. Anyone can use Spacemesh since the network is permissionless, but not all users are created equal. We want to reward the early adopters and the OG supporters that have been with us patiently for years. Like Bitcoin, the longer it takes the world to discover Bitcoin the more time there will be for these folks to mine coins. Anyway, there’s no rush to join—given the exceptionally long issuance period, every day will feel like genesis for quite some time.
While we’re not prioritizing marketing in the traditional sense at this stage, I’m not naive and neither is the team. I know very well that the best technology doesn’t automatically win and that marketing is important. It doesn’t matter how good your product is if no one ever learns about it or has the opportunity to try it. And that’s all marketing is in essence: education and communications. In this respect it’s untrue to say that we don’t do marketing. But the forms of marketing that are values aligned and that work for us are unlike the forms of marketing that work for most blockchain and Web3 projects.
The problem with mainstream marketing is that it’s almost 100% BS. This is true even (or perhaps especially) for blockchain projects—at least those targeting mainstream users and use cases. I can’t tell you how many talks I’ve listened to by people on the sales and marketing teams of these projects who have zero fundamental understanding of the underlying technology or even why it matters. I can’t think of anything sadder than a person paid to sell a thing that they don’t actually understand, care about, or even really believe in. I genuinely don’t understand why companies and projects hire people like this or let them speak in public. Maybe investors demand “sales”, and maybe meaningless marketing nonsense appeals to enterprise types, but it comes as across to me as incredibly inauthentic and unappealing. Our primary “customer” at this moment is developers, and developers have a fantastic BS radar.
For Spacemesh, marketing is just talking about the thing that we’re building, the thing we love to work on and love to talk about, as our authentic selves. Nothing more and nothing less. This sort of authentic communication appeals to developers, as it should to most regular (read: non-corporate) people.
I maintain that the best marketing is no marketing; the best products speak for themselves, and the best products create rabid advocates among customers and users. The two most authentic, effective forms of marketing are passionate stories from team members and testimonials from happy customers.
As you can see there really is no “secret” to Spacemesh. Yes we’re different, yes we’re weird, yes we’re a bit iconoclastic and averse to social norms that we disagree with, but in the end it’s all quite basic stuff: we are our authentic selves and we’re sharing our passion. Our goal is to be good people, stay humble, and build things people want to use. We’re not interested in playing the “game” that other projects are caught up in or tracking vanity metrics. That’s all it boils down to. We focus on our values, a healthy community, and solid engineering. These things are all slow, difficult, and unsexy, and there are no shortcuts, which is why most people and most projects skip them entirely in favor of vanity metrics and flashy, expensive marketing campaigns that don’t age well. Values, community, and engineering by contrast are timeless.
It may take longer to build awareness of Spacemesh but that’s perfectly okay with us because it’ll be the right kind of growth: namely, sustainable growth, not growth fueled by opportunists that will disappear the moment another shiny thing comes along. We’re in this for the right reasons and for the very long term and I know this resonates with the right people because they’ve told me, time and time again.