Subspace Network is a rising Layer 1 protocol powering Web3 @ Internet scale. The crypto-native team wanted a non-custodial way to manage their crypto payroll globally.
Hear from Jeremiah Wagstaff, CEO and Co-founder at Subspace Labs, about how Request Finance helps the team simplify crypto payments and financial reporting in a simple, non-custodial way.
Request Finance not only saves us 1-2 hours per week in processing crypto payments, but also saves us days during our annual tax and corporate reporting seasons. Our crypto payments history can be exported in a single keystroke for analysis and preparation of tax and financial statements. - Jeremiah Wagstaff, CEO and Co-founder at Subspace Labs
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.
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.
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.
There is simply no other way to pay our contractors in crypto without sacrificing financial control or other core Web3 values of Subspace. We couldn’t easily compensate our staff in crypto without committing funds to a centralized and permissioned platform.
As a non-custodial enterprise crypto payments platform, Request Finance shares the same values as Subspace. We’re proud to share ideas with other thought leaders in the community to promote the use of tech that is permissionless, trustless and fully decentralized.
Before we started using Request Finance, 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.
Our finance team uses Request Finance to pay essentially all of our contractors in the cryptocurrency of their choice. All we need to do is to send them a secure link, which opens up an invoice with our billing information already filled in.
What I like best about the platform is the flexibility to pay invoices as they arrive in our dashboard, and the fact that this happens in a fully decentralized manner too! This aligns with the ethos of Subspace, and also allows us to maintain control of our funds in multisig wallets.
We are excited to see the continuous improvements made to the UX, and look forward to new features such as payment notifications, and integrations with more traditional accounting systems and financial reporting tools.
Three of the biggest benefits of using Request Finance for us are that: (i) everyone maintains complete control of their funds in their self-custodial wallets, (ii) we can pay in any crypto we like, while our vendors can receive the currency of their choice, (iii) and all our 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 us 1-2 hours per week in processing crypto payments, and also saves us days of work during our annual tax and corporate reporting seasons. Our crypto payments history can be exported in a single keystroke for the analysis and preparation of our tax and financial statements.
The Subspace executive management team looked at systems like Gusto and Deel, but they required us to link bank accounts and send fiat payments. We needed a crypto-native solution without needing to involve centralized financial institutions.
We were up and running on the basic platform in a matter of days. We got all our contractors on-board in just over an hour.