According to a press release on the Spacemesh site, the blockchain startup has raised $15 million in series A funding. The release reads:
Spacemesh, a community of academic researchers and open source developers developing a base layer protocol for a new blockchain infrastructure, announced today a Series A investment of $15 million, led by Polychain, the world’s premier investor in cryptocurrency protocols. Among the additional prominent blockchain investors this round are MetaStable, Paradigm (Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam’s new fund), Coinbase Ventures, Bain Capital, 1kx, Arrington XRP Capital, Danhua Capital, Electric Capital, Collaborative Fund, Jack Herrick and others. They join Spacemesh seed investors: Slow Ventures, Dekrypt Capital, iAngels, BRM and Gigi Levy-Weiss.
Spacemesh are looking to grow their team as a further step towards realizing their goal of launching their blockmesh operating system, which will run on a consensus referred to as “Proof of Space Time” (PoST) which they see as being a replacement for Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms.
The key difference between PoST and PoW / PoS is the idea that it can run on any computer and is a way to end the reliance on ASIC chips and CPUs, which are not only costly, but hard to get. Nowadays, mining companies are monopolizing in a way that makes it almost impossible for individual miners to set themselves up, flying in the face of the traditional idea of decentralization.
Back in May, Spacemesh representative Tomer Afek said:
I think both Ethereum and Bitcoin, with all the best intentions, ended up unavailable to the home miner and centralized on the other end. So our intention was to create something that would always be open to the home miner.While going about it we also realized we we can also support a very scalable blockchain which can handle thousands of transactions per second. Now, the plans have moved on: “ We are iterating on the protocols as well as the full node implementation, and [are] only going to release a mainnet and the Spacemesh programmable cryptocurrency once we have done extensive security and critical bugs audits and have published the full Spacemesh protocol and its rigorous and peer-reviewed security proofs.”A testnet is expected to be launched at the start of 2019. Stay tuned to Bitrazzi for all the latest on this story.