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:
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.
The Autonomys Network — the foundation layer for AI3.0 — is a hyper-scalable decentralized AI (deAI) infrastructure stack encompassing high-throughput permanent distributed storage, data availability and access, and modular execution. Our deAI ecosystem provides all the essential components to build and deploy secure super dApps (AI-powered dApps) and on-chain agents, equipping them with advanced AI capabilities for dynamic and autonomous functionality.
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