Helping Web3 networks to scale with Subspace

Problem

Subspace could not find a way to pay their contractors in crypto without sacrificing financial control or other core Web3 values of their team. They couldn’t easily compensate our staff in crypto without committing funds to a centralized and permissioned platform.

Invoices from our contractors were maintained as individual PDF documents. Crypto payments were being remitted without being reconciled with their respective invoices, and there was no way to historically link them together for tracking purposes. It was nearly impossible to track our crypto payments.

Existing systems like Gusto and Deel were not suitable, as they required linking to bank accounts and sending fiat payments, which did not align with Subspace's need for a crypto-native solution.

Solution

As a non-custodial enterprise crypto payments platform, Request Finance shares the same values as Subspace: to promote the use of tech that is permissionless, trustless and fully decentralized. 

The finance team at Subspace uses Request Finance to pay essentially all of their contractors in the cryptocurrency of their choice. All they need to do is to send their contractors a secure link, which opens up an invoice with their billing information already filled in. It’s easy and they got all their contractors on-board in just over an hour. 

What Substack likes best about the app is the flexibility to pay invoices as they arrive in the dashboard, and the fact that this happens in a fully decentralized manner too! This aligns with the ethos of Subspace, and also allows them to maintain control of their funds in multisig wallets.

The continuous improvements to the user experience, along with anticipated features such as payment notifications and integrations with traditional accounting systems, further enhanced the overall experience.

Saves 1-2 hours per week

Three major benefits that stood out to Substack:

(i) everyone maintains complete control of their funds in their self-custodial wallets

(ii) they can pay in any crypto they like, while their vendors can receive the currency of their choice

(iii) and all their crypto payments are visible from a single dashboard, and processed without sacrificing decentralization or control

The batch payments feature minimizes transaction costs (gas fees) by combining hundreds of invoice payments into a single transaction, while still maintaining the history of who was paid according to their respective invoices. 

Request Finance saves Substack 1-2 hours per week in processing crypto payments, and also saves us days of work during our annual tax and corporate reporting seasons.  The ability to export crypto payments history in a single keystroke streamlined the analysis and preparation of tax and financial statements.

“Before using Request Finance, we were managing our company’s financial operations in crypto using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of counterparties’ billing information, and wallet addresses. Today, we can easily send and receive crypto payments using Request Finance’s invoicing tool.”‍

Jeremiah Wagstaff, CEO and Co-founder at Subspace Labs

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‍About Subspace

In 2019, Jeremiah Wagstaff received a grant from the US National Science Foundation to develop a way to resolve the blockchain trilemma - the trade-offs between security, decentralization, and scalability. A year and a half, and less than 10,000 lines of Rust code later, Subspace was born. 

Designed with a multi-chain blockchain landscape in mind, Subspace is a highly scalable, modular blockchain which offers both storage and compute that is fully interoperable with any blockchain network. This provides a shared infrastructure layer for builders across different, siloed ecosystems today and enables native cross-chain messaging, including rollups. 

Using a novel Proof-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS) consensus model, the team hopes to enable a massively scalable, permanent data availability layer across one of the most distributed blockchain networks. 

Wagstaff says this is made possible because farmers on the Subspace network store unique segments of the blockchain history, allowing it to scale without sacrificing decentralization, or security. Each additional node joining the network will contribute higher computational throughput and lower fees for both storage and transactions.

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Subspace also provides a standard archival storage layer to ensure the history of any supported blockchain is retained indefinitely, and remains accessible under a standard retrieval API. It is currently backing up the entire history of chains like Polkadot, Kusama, and most of the live parachains in the Dotsama ecosystem. The team say Ethereum and its ecosystem will soon follow suit, followed by other layer one blockchain ecosystems. 

The team is enthusiastic about its potential to become the foundational layer for on-chain storage of NFTs and projects in the open metaverse. 

Their design allows for chains to easily offload non-essential contract states, in addition to having a permanent storage layer for rich assets such as video or image file associated with an NFT, to Subspace while retaining the same guarantees of persistence, immutability, and availability. All this, they say can be achieved at a fraction of the cost of existing decentralized storage networks.

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In the coming quarters, Subspace hopes to support native cross-chain messaging, and provide a highly scalable, on-demand permanent storage layer to all dApps built on any existing blockchain. The Subspace testnet is already live with over 25k community-run nodes actively participating in consensus while the mainnet is slated to go live towards the end of 2022. 

In March, Subspace Labs announced a US $33 million strategic financing round led by Pantera Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com, Alameda Research, ConsenSys Mesh, and more. 

The team at Subspace is currently staffed by over 20 experienced professionals hailing from projects like Dapper Labs/Flow, Restream, Protocol Labs, Brave, Stanford, and more. They expect to triple their engineering headcount this year.