Welcome to the October Project Update from the Subspace Network!
Each month, the Subspace Network team publishes project updates to keep you informed on all the progress our team is making. Enjoy!
Building the Team
We are proud to announce the strategic acquihire of Canyon Network, a permanent storage layer for Web3 that has received and delivered multiple Web3 Grants. Liu-Cheng Xu, the founder at Canyon, has joined our team as Lead Protocol Engineer. After having several conversations with Liu-Cheng, it was clear that we are deeply aligned on our vision to bring decentralized storage to the Polkadot ecosystem.
Xu brings years of industry experience in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, having previously served as the lead protocol engineer for ChainX. He has deep familiarity with the Polkadot ecosystem, Substrate Framework, and the challenges of building Distributed Storage Networks. By working together, we will be able to bring a better product to market faster.
Our engineering offsite in Barcelona, Spain, was a huge success! For the first time, we had the entire engineering team together in a face-to-face setting. We conducted a thorough review of our protocol stack and planned out the next round of engineering milestones. More importantly, we were able to get to know each other better as a team.
Community and Outreach
We have launched a new and improved website featuring a better-defined value prop, as well as a showcase of our products, roadmap, tech, team, social media, and backers. News and FAQ pages will be added soon.
As part of the new website, we have made our community groups fully open and accessible to the public. Our Discord has reached 315 members, and our Telegram has reached 375 subscribers, with zero marketing.
Thanks to the help from our friends at Hypersphere and CabinVC, Subspace is starting to show up in the news. Nine crypto news websites picked up the announcement of Dr. David Tse joining the team, and the Canyon Network acquihire has appeared in three so far.
Research & Engineering
Our private Aries Testnet is live and running strong! Aries features our novel proof-of-archival-storage (PoAS) consensus algorithm and permanent object storage API, as described in our technical whitepaper. Aries is not intended for community farmers yet, as it will see several restarts over the next few weeks as we continue to upgrade.
Our entire team has been working hard on removing technical debt and building scalable infrastructure to prepare for the continued growth and expansion of our protocol stack, test network, and dApp layer. Leo has revamped our Digital Ocean backend, allowing multiple concurrent dev and test networks to run in parallel. Liu-Cheng has been refactoring and documenting our core consensus algorithm. Ozgun has transitioned from the GPU plotter to the farmer protocol by refactoring it from a static binary into a more composable and extensible library.
On the research front, we have been working with Dr. Tse on a security analysis of our decoupled execution and vertical scaling design, which includes crucial elements of the Prism protocol he helped create. After many design reviews, Liu-Cheng has begun working on an initial decoupling implementation, a non-trivial endeavor given the complexity of Substrate, and plans to have a proof-of-concept working in the next few months.
Next Steps
Over the next month, we plan to:
- Fully archive Kusama and Polkadot from genesis.
- Implement storage retrievals (gets) on the subspace farmer.
- Begin testing an initial version of Subspace js (dev storage SDK).
- Deploy a proof-of-concept for decoupled execution.
Thanks for reading another issue, and stay tuned for more announcements and updates in the coming months!
Best,
The Subspace Network team.
The Subspace Network Monthly Project Update | Oct 2021 was originally published in Subspace Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
