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August 7, 2025

Understanding Proof-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS)

https://www.autonomys.xyz/network-operators

Autonomys Network utilizes a unique consensus mechanism known as Proof-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS). Introduced by Subspace Labs in 2021, PoAS uniquely integrates blockchain consensus directly with permanent data storage, distinguishing Autonomys clearly from other decentralized storage approaches. Unlike traditional consensus models relying on token holdings (Proof-of-Stake) or computational power (Proof-of-Work), PoAS leverages physical SSD storage space as its foundational economic and security resource.

How PoAS Works

In PoAS consensus, network participants — known as “farmers” — store provably unique segments of the blockchain’s historical data. Farmers dedicate disk space to store these cryptographically verifiable segments. The more historical blockchain data a farmer commits to storing, the higher their likelihood of earning block and vote rewards. This economic model directly aligns farmers’ incentives with maintaining data integrity and enhancing overall network security.

Key Components of PoAS

Archiving: Archiving ensures blockchain data is securely and permanently preserved. Farmers store segments of blockchain history, each uniquely identifiable via cryptographic hashes, guaranteeing verifiability and resistance to tampering. Data undergoes automatic erasure-coding and is replicated across multiple global nodes, significantly enhancing redundancy, resilience, and fault tolerance. Through archiving, Autonomys secures cryptographically verifiable historical records within a decentralized network, reinforcing PoAS’s commitments to permanent data availability and integrity.
Plotting: Before actively participating, farmers must “plot” their storage. This plotting process involves generating cryptographic proofs, known as commitments, through a computationally intensive procedure that securely binds specific segments of blockchain history to the farmer’s allocated disk space. Plotting creates cryptographic evidence ensuring data uniqueness, enabling rapid authentication and verification by the network. This process safeguards against data duplication and manipulation, effectively preparing and securing each farmer’s contribution for active participation.
Farming: Farming represents farmers’ active engagement in the consensus process. Farmers continuously monitor the network for opportunities to propose new blocks, with the probability of selection directly tied to the quantity of blockchain history stored. Upon selection, farmers produce cryptographic proofs based on their plotted commitments, which other network nodes validate. Successful validations result in block acceptance and reward distribution, economically incentivizing farmers to maintain substantial, high-quality storage capacity and aligning their interests directly with network security.
Proof-of-Time (PoT): Complementing PoAS, Proof-of-Time ensures fixed intervals of real-world time between block proposals, preventing adversaries from retroactively rewriting blockchain history. PoT employs iterative evaluations of a cryptographic delay function — specifically repeated AES-128 encryption — that ensures sequential processing resistant to significant acceleration by advanced hardware. Specialized nodes known as Timekeepers manage these computations. Timekeepers are dedicated nodes equipped with high-performance CPUs solely responsible for performing PoT evaluations and distributing outputs. They release intermediate checkpoints, enabling farmers to conduct rapid, parallel verification, enhancing both network efficiency and security.

Security and Fault Tolerance

The security model underpinning PoAS is tightly linked to data redundancy and decentralization. Autonomys achieves robust fault tolerance through automated erasure-coded data replication across globally distributed nodes. The more storage farmers collectively pledge, the greater the redundancy and resilience of blockchain data. This decentralized approach significantly reduces risks of data loss, corruption, or manipulation by any single participant.

Economic Alignment and Scalability

PoAS aligns economic incentives closely with data integrity and availability. Farmers are motivated to store the blockchain history, naturally expanding the network’s data capacity as participation grows. This scalability approach ensures proportional network expansion, avoiding bottlenecks typically observed in conventional blockchain systems.

Comparative Advantages

PoAS offers distinct advantages compared to other decentralized storage methods, which often depend on off-chain trust assumptions or manual replication:

True On-Chain Storage: Data inherits permanence and security guarantees directly from blockchain technology.
Automatic Data Redundancy: Continuous, automated replication ensures robust fault tolerance.
Verifiable Integrity: Cryptographic proofs guarantee data authenticity, immutability, and resistance to tampering.

Practical Implications

Empowered by PoAS, Autonomys Network can support next-generation, high-throughput, low-cost decentralized applications (dApps). Developers benefit from accessible tools such as Auto Drive, which provides a user-friendly interface similar to traditional cloud storage platforms but with decentralized security guarantees.

In essence, PoAS positions Autonomys Network uniquely within the blockchain ecosystem by closely integrating consensus, security, and storage into a verifiably secure, economically efficient, and inherently scalable infrastructure.

To learn more about PoAS, visit the Autonomys Academy:
https://academy.autonomys.xyz/autonomys-network/consensus/proof-of-archival-storage

To join the Autonomys ecosystem as a Farmer, Operator, or Timekeeper visit:

About Autonomys

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Partnerships

July 25, 2025

Autonomys x PAI3: Advancing Decentralized AI Infrastructure

Autonomys is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with PAI3, a decentralized infrastructure network powering AI compute, models, and data through a permissionless and people-owned framework.

Key Aspects of the Partnership

Permanent On-Chain Storage for AI Workloads: PAI3 will integrate Auto Drive, Autonomys’ user-friendly gateway to permanent, verifiable on-chain storage, to support the availability and integrity of its AI data pipelines. This ensures that encrypted data and model inputs remain tamper-proof and cryptographically auditable.
Support for Decentralized AI Development: PAI3 enables an AI sharing economy where containerized AI modules, decentralized inference, and a tokenized reward system allow contributors to earn and users to benefit. Through this integration, PAI3 reinforces the trust and transparency of its AI outputs by anchoring critical data in Autonomys’ Proof-of-Archival-Storage-powered distributed storage network (DSN).

Integration efforts are expected to begin in the coming weeks, with both teams exploring a proof-of-concept (PoC) and potential areas for deeper technical collaboration. A follow-up integration announcement will share more details as the partnership evolves.

About PAI3

PAI3 is a decentralized network of compute, models, and data — where every contributor earns and every user benefits. This is the AI sharing economy: containerized AI modules, verifiable decentralized inference, and a tokenized reward layer — all powered by the $PAI3 token.

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About Autonomys

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Community

July 21, 2025

Ecosystem Grants Program Announced by the Subspace Foundation

With the launch of Mainnet Phase-2 and activation of native $AI3 token transfers, Autonomys enters a new phase — one defined not only by technical progress, but by ecosystem empowerment.

From its beginnings as Subspace, Autonomys has been built to deliver decentralized infrastructure that is scalable, permanent, and verifiable. Over the past several years, this has taken shape through the development of a globally distributed storage network (DSN), the introduction of the Auto Drive storage gateway, the Auto SDK, and now, modular execution environments. With these tools live, the focus shifts from core protocol development to ecosystem growth.

To support this next stage, the Subspace Foundation is preparing to launch an Ecosystem Grants Program. This is not a formal program launch, but rather an initial introduction to the initiative and the types of projects the Foundation will prioritize. All grant-related activities, funding decisions, and communications will come directly from the Subspace Foundation.

Program Scope

The Ecosystem Grants Program is designed to provide funding and support to projects that expand Autonomys’ functionality, drive usage, or build upon existing infrastructure. Funding will be considered across five initial categories:

Infrastructure
Including alternate clients, developer tools, encryption layers, test environments, or new interfaces for Auto Drive or DSN nodes.
AI-powered dApps & Agents
Applications that leverage the Autonomys stack to enable verifiable, on-chain intelligent behavior — such as co-pilots, autonomous DeFi agents, or social agents.
Integrations
Projects that connect Autonomys to other systems, including bridges, relayers, oracles, or external SDK/plugin layers.
Research
Proposals related to novel consensus models, DSN optimization, ZK or FHE experimentation, or governance design.
Community & Growth
Developer education, ecosystem onboarding, and content efforts — such as tutorials, hackathons, bootcamps, or documentation.

Example Project Types

A detailed set of example project ideas is available on the example projects page. A few illustrative examples include:

A third-party Auto Drive interface with a custom UI or performance profile.
A governance platform using Auto Drive for encrypted proposal storage and Auto EVM for voting.
An AI data labeling dApp that supports agent-generated training data sets on the DSN.
A cross-chain bridge that connects Autonomys to other networks, such as Solana or Base.

These examples are intended to guide applicants, not constrain them. Proposals that fall outside these categories but demonstrate strong alignment with the network’s goals will also be considered.

What Selected Projects Can Expect

Selected proposals will receive:

Milestone-based funding through grants administered by the Subspace Foundation.
Technical and product support from Autonomys contributors.
Visibility across Autonomys community and communication channels.
Ongoing guidance through key build stages from prototype to deployment.

The program is intended to support long-term, meaningful contributions — not one-off experiments.

Application Process

Ahead of its official launch, the Subspace Foundation is welcoming early Ecosystem Grants Program proposals at subspace.foundation/grants.

Applicants can:

Read the program overview and eligibility criteria
Review detailed FAQs and example projects
Submit their proposals for review

Applications are evaluated on a rolling basis. A working prototype is not required at submission, but proposals must demonstrate technical soundness, clarity of scope, and relevance to the Autonomys mission.

Looking Ahead

Autonomys has entered a new phase. The protocol is live. The tools are in place. The network is growing.

Through the Ecosystem Grants Program, the Subspace Foundation is supporting the next wave of development — initiatives that extend, apply, and scale what has been built.

For questions, visit the forum, reach out on Discord, or contact the Foundation directly through the grants portal.

About Autonomys

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Community

July 14, 2025

Our Evolution from Subspace to Autonomys

Autonomys began with a shared conviction: that the future of the internet needed a decentralized, community-owned foundation — one that preserved data permanently, remained scalable without compromise, and invited global participation without privilege. That vision first took shape as the Subspace Network, a research initiative born from open-source collaboration and sustained by years of deep technical work.

Between 2018 and 2020, founders Jeremiah Wagstaff and Nazar Mokrynskyi met through GitHub and co-founded Subspace Labs. Their mission: to create a decentralized base layer that could support internet-scale dApps where users — not centralized intermediaries — controlled their own data. Backed by research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Web3 Foundation, their early R&D laid the technical groundwork for what would become a fourth-generation Layer-1 blockchain.

In 2021, Subspace Labs introduced its novel consensus mechanism — Proof-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS) — and launched the Subspace Network. This approach rewarded farmers for storing provably unique pieces of blockchain history using commodity hardware, ensuring accessibility for everyday participants. PoAS ties consensus directly to permanent storage, meaning the more space a farmer contributes, the more history they store, and the greater their chances of block and vote rewards. This model doesn’t just make data availability and integrity cryptographically enforceable; it makes them economically aligned with network security. The network would scale proportionally with user growth, offering what many considered an unsolvable combination: decentralization, scalability, and security.

By 2022, Subspace became the first protocol to offer dynamically available permanent distributed storage, archiving entire ecosystems like Polkadot and its parachains. That year, 30,000+ nodes across 60+ countries participated in the Gemini II incentivized testnet, pledging over 1.3 PiB of storage. Backed by a $33M strategic round led by Pantera Capital and joined by Coinbase Ventures, ConsenSys Mesh, and others, Subspace Labs expanded its infrastructure by introducing domains — decoupled execution environments for modular runtime support. In 2023, the first domain — Nova, our Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) runtime, now called Auto EVM — was launched on the Gemini III testnet.

By 2023, it was clear that the same infrastructure powering permissionless storage and modular execution could serve a broader, emerging use case: decentralized AI. As machine learning and autonomous agents began demanding high-throughput, verifiable, and censorship-resistant infrastructure, the Subspace team recognized an inflection point. In 2024, Subspace Labs and the Subspace Network transitioned into Autonomys Labs and the Autonomys Network — marking a shift in mission toward enabling radical autonomy for humans and bounded autonomy for AI, while continuing to build on the technical foundations originally laid under Subspace.

As Autonomys, we refined our roadmap to focus on providing the foundational infrastructure for AI3.0 — a term we use to describe the next era of decentralized, agent-driven artificial intelligence. In this new paradigm, AI agents interact with data, systems, and users across trustless, verifiable environments — requiring storage, computation, and identity frameworks that cannot be owned or controlled by centralized actors.

Since then, we’ve reached several major milestones:

Successfully launched Mainnet Phase-1, bootstrapping consensus and activating our storage layer on mainnet.
Onboarded 1,000+ globally distributed farmers, who have pledged over 500 petabytes of SSD storage to the network — now available as a permanent, on-chain storage solution for any project that can benefit from it.
Continued expanding our modular AI3.0 stack, including:
Auto Drive — Our gateway to on-chain permanent storage, offering a familiar interface and true Web3 data guarantees
Auto Agents Framework — Our framework for building truly autonomous on-chain AI agents with permanent memory and chain of thought
Auto SDK — Our developer toolkit that simplifies building and integration with TypeScript and RESTful API support
Auto ID — Our upcoming self-sovereign identity primitive, designed to enable secure, verifiable human–agent interactions at scale

Autonomys is now a purpose-built foundation for a world where AI agents, humans, and systems operate on verifiable data — stored, secured, and served by a decentralized network. We’re building toward a future that doesn’t require trust, because its architecture leaves no room for doubt.

As we look ahead to Mainnet Phase-2 — which will introduce $AI3 token transferability, roll out our domain layer, and launch Auto EVM — we remain committed to the same first principles that started this journey: decentralization without compromise, participation without privilege, and permanence without trade-offs.

To our community — thank you. Your support is what made our growth journey from Subspace to Autonomys not just possible, but powerful.

About Autonomys

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Protocol

July 9, 2025

Autonomys Mainnet Phase-2 Transfer Enablement Scheduled for July 16, 2025 (16:00 UTC)