KuCoin AMA With Spacemesh (SMH) — Achieving Equality Through Layer-1 Blockchain Technology

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: June 24, 2024, 12:00 PM - 01:02 PM (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session featuring the Chief Architect of Spacemesh, Noam Nelke, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Official Website: https://spacemesh.io/

Whitepaper: Click to view

Follow Spacemesh on X, Telegram and Discord

Q: How is Spacemesh different from other layer-1 blockchains?

Noam: Spacemesh uses Proof-of-Space-over-Time to secure the protocol. This avoids the energy waste of Proof-of-Work and the circular dependencies of Proof-of-Stake. At the same time, it’s the first blockchain protocol that’s fair for home miners, allowing for a long-tail of small miners to form. The way blocks are constructed and propagated on Spacemesh allows for a much higher transaction throughput and therefore lower fees, even when demand for blockspace is high.

Q: You said that Spacemesh is fair for home miners, but how can small players compete with industrial miners, who enjoy economies of scale?

Noam: Great question! The idea is that home smeshers (that’s what we call Spacemesh miners) can use their already existing, idle disk space. For home users who run a network node anyway, the effective additional cost of smeshing is near zero, while industrial smeshers have to pay for storage and other costs associated with running their operation.

Q: What about mining pools, can’t they undercut the advantage for small miners?

Noam: The Spacemesh protocol was specifically designed to address the advantages of pools on other blockchain networks. It guarantees a mining reward every two-week epoch for smeshers, as long as they allocate a minimal amount of storage (256 GiB) and rewards are linear with the allocated space - so a large allocation (e.g. by pooling together) doesn’t have any advantage in the size of the reward per byte.

Having said that, given our focus on home smeshers, we have seen pools form on Spacemesh, mainly to provide some missing features for larger smeshers. As our software matures and more of these needs of larger smeshers are addressed - we believe the utility of Spacemesh pools will decrease.

Q: It looks like inflation is more rapid on Spacemesh compared to other cryptocurrencies, how come?

Noam: Unlike other nascent blockchains, Spacemesh had no premine. This means the initial amount of circulating coins was literally zero and all coins in circulation today originated from mining. When you have millions of coins circulating, the new mining rewards are relatively small, but when there are very few coins circulating, any new coins entering circulation make it look like inflation is high.

Q: What’s the Spacemesh total supply?

Noam: The Spacemesh issuance schedule is explained in detail here.

The total supply will be 2.4 billion SMH, but we’ll only reach that point in almost 2,000 years! It’ll take Spacemesh about 20 years just to reach the first billion coin.

We currently have ~43 million SMH circulating, with 468 new SMH issued every 5-minute layer.

Q: Does Spacemesh have a VM with smart contracts?

Noam: Spacemesh was designed to support smart contracts. We have pretty ambitious plans for our L1 VM. We call it Athena and you can read more about it here. Since we didn’t want to compromise on the Athena featureset, we decided to decouple the development of the VM from the consensus protocol and launched with a limited temporary VM that only supports a handful of pre-deployed smart contracts. However, it was designed with Athena in mind and fully supports the infrastructure features required to make Athena shine!

We’re currently hard at work implementing the Athena vision and hope to be able to launch it in 2025.

Q: Can you provide details about any security audits conducted on your project? How do you prioritize and address potential vulnerabilities to ensure the safety of users' funds and data?

Noam: Yes! We’ve recently completed our first 3rd party security audit with Halborn. You can find their full report here.

In general, we prioritize issues based on their potential impact on users and the network and the viability of an exploit. If an issue could allow stealing funds or somehow bring down the network it’s considered critical. If it only allows slowing down transactions and is hard to exploit - it’s generally low priority.

Q: How can I join your community and start earning money?

Noam: Just visit our website for easy to follow instructions.

Q: How does the project plan to sustain long-term value for its token, and what strategies are in place to ensure a steady growth in profitability for token holders?

Noam: Spacemesh has a slow long-term issuance plan and a long list of improvements on the roadmap. We’re just getting started, and with almost no PR we’ve attracted scores of followers and active participants in the network. Once Athena rolls out, the full potential of the system will start to become visible.

Q: Almost 80% of investors are focused purely on the price of the token in the short term of understanding the real value and health of the project. Could you tell us the motivations and benefits for investors to hold your token in the long term?

Noam: Unlike coins with a premine, Spacemesh compensates its team with locked coins that vest over a long period of time. Even the company and investor coins are all subject to the same vesting schedule. This creates an alignment of interests for everyone involved to NOT pump-and-dump, but rather create value in the long term. This is why we chose to go to mainnet with a temporary VM and it guides a lot of our decisions - we’re here for the next decades, not the next bull cycle.

Q: Is your platform suitable for Crypto Beginners? Or is it only limited for professional users?

Noam: It’s definitely for both beginners and professionals! Just visit our website for easy instructions on how to get started.

If you’re a beginner, we have a graphical app for managing your wallet as well as participating in the network and earning rewards.

If you’re a professional, we also offer a command-line wallet and you can easily operate a full node to get rewards.

Q: What inspired the creation of spacemesh and its unique approach to blockchain technology?

Noam: Our chief scientists Prof. Tal Moran and Dr. Iddo Bentov created the idea as a research paper. When the company founders discovered it, they found that it aligned perfectly with their vision for a fair and decentralized cryptocurrency and the rest is history.

Q: Staking and NFTs are currently trending! Will you consider implementing NFT technology in your future products?

Noam: NFTs will be enabled once Athena is rolled out. While it’s not precisely staking, part of Athena will be roles where some funds are required and they can be translated into rewards.

Q: As a project, it is crucial to attract non-crypto users for mainstream adoption. Can you share your strategies to entice non-crypto users towards your platform? Also, are there any upcoming partnerships in the pipeline that will bring in non-crypto users and facilitate real-world use cases?

Noam: Definitely! First of all, we have a very low barrier to entry for both smeshers who want to earn rewards and regular users who want to transact. As the platform matures we have plans for collaborations that will bring in non technical users that are not classical “crypto bros”…

Q: How different Proof-of-Space-over-Time on traditional consensus mechanisms like Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake? How does it work?

Noam: I encourage you to read more here.

Q: Where can I buy the $SMH token?

Noam: Well, we just got listed on KuCoin!

🎁 Participate in the Spacemesh AMA quiz now for a chance to win 10 in USDT.

The form will remain open for five days from publishing this AMA recap.

KuCoin and Spacemesh have prepared a total of 2,000 USDT to give away to AMA participants.

1. Pre-AMA activity: 800 USDT

2. Free-ask section: 50 USDT

3. Flash mini-game: 400 USDT

4. Post-AMA quiz: 750 USDT

Sign up for a KuCoin account if you haven’t done so yet, and ensure you complete your KYC verification to be eligible for the rewards.

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