Subspace Network — the killer of PoW and PoS?
Subspace is a new scalable Layer-1 blockchain that in the future can serve as an infrastructure layer for the entire Web3 ecosystem. Subspace offers smart storage for everything the users need, from NFT-based games to cross-network applications. The blockchain is designed to solve fundamental problems of the current crypto world, such as ecology, centralization, and lack of scalability.
To solve these problems, Subspace implements Proof-of-Capacity.
What is Proof-of-Capacity?
Proof-of-Capacity is the leading alternative to Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake based consensus. In a Proof-of-Capacity blockchain, compute-intensive mining is replaced with storage-intensive farming. Yes, farming. In other words, it is based on the use of free space on a file storage device of the users. Such HDD farming does not require the purchase of expensive video cards, high-powered power supplies, and motherboards with a considerable number of connectors to get the job done. To make money on HDD, a simple laptop with standard parameters and a built-in video card is enough. However, the requirements for hard-drive increased.
The key benefit is that Proof-of-Capacity is energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable while having security properties more similar to Proof-of-Work than Proof-of-Stake. This type of farming also has the potential to be ASIC-resistant, allowing ordinary users to participate in consensus with regular hardware, although this depends heavily on the implementation of the underlying consensus.
The network currently has over 20,000 community-run active nodes, making Subspace one of the most decentralized networks.
What do you need to become a Subspace farmer
It seems that with Subspace you can also run the node in the background on your laptop without affecting your daily usage. Recommended minimum hardware requirements include 2 dedicated CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, but it is better to have 8GB, and 60GB of hard drive space.
In short, if you can play a game or watch Netflix on your computer, it can also run a node. The farmer node can run natively on macOS, Windows, and Linux operating systems. In addition, some community members were able to run a farmer node on Raspberry Pi, though it is not officially supported as of today.
Many investors are interested
In March, Subspace Labs announced the completion of a $33 million financing round led by Pantera Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com, Alameda Research, and others.
Conclusion
Subspace Network is designed to be a massively scalable and distributed infrastructure for Web3, powering the rich selection of platforms across chains. Developers wanted Subspace to be open and permissionless from day one so that anyone with a laptop could participate in the network from anywhere in the world and get rewarded for their contributions.
All of this makes Subspace unique when compared with most other blockchains. Yes, it is not the only project that uses Proof-of-Capacity but is it definitely the most promising one. Testnet is already active so you can try it out on your own. Full integration with Polkadot and Kusama is expected in the near future.
Official website — https://subspace.network/
Discord — https://discord.gg/subspace-network
Twitter — https://twitter.com/NetworkSubspace
