Dispersion Capital participated in the $8M seed round of Space and Time (SxT), a decentralized data platform for blockchain applications, as one of our initial major investments in data infrastructure for Web3. This investment was made before our official fund was fully set up, as we saw the platform’s potential to fill a crucial gap in Web3: the need for a robust, decentralized data infrastructure that supports emerging dynamic smart contracts and dApps. Space and Time has positioned itself as a cross-chain data analytics platform serving dynamic smart contracts and dApps. Its curated contextual database derived from raw public blockchain data enhances its competitive advantage. The founders and senior leaders at Teradata bring deep expertise in database and analytics platforms, which aligns perfectly with the company’s mission to build a decentralized data infrastructure for Web3.

While raw data in Web3 is widely accessible, the landscape presents several significant technical challenges that hinder the development of big data applications like real-time recommender systems and predictive analytics. A major issue is the lack of reliable off-chain data permanence—Web3 applications require seamless integration of on-chain and off-chain data. Still, existing solutions often struggle to maintain secure, permanent storage for off-chain data, which is critical for comprehensive analytics.

Moreover, the high latency and costs associated with on-chain data access due to gas fees and limited computational capacity make real-time and large-scale data processing challenging. This is compounded by semantic fragmentation across blockchains, where varying data standards create significant obstacles to data discovery, interoperability, and efficient querying.

Additionally, decentralized applications must trust the integrity of the data they consume. Smart contracts require cryptographically proven data to ensure accuracy and security, but traditional data platforms lack the necessary proof mechanisms, creating a critical gap in the Web3 infrastructure.

Space and Time addresses these challenges with its real-time data warehousing infrastructure, which supports automated data migrations across storage types, balancing performance with cost efficiency. By normalizing and indexing data from multiple blockchains, SxT provides a unified set of semantics, simplifying data discovery and querying across chains. Its platform ensures data permanence and performance and delivers cryptographically proven query results, meeting the trust requirements of intelligent contracts.

As Web3 evolves, the need for scalable, interoperable, and trustworthy data solutions will only grow. Space and Time is positioning itself at the forefront of this movement, providing the foundational data infrastructure needed for the decentralized future.

Founders’ Expertise and Vision

Space and Time was co-founded by Nate Holiday and Scott Dykstra, who bring extensive experience from their senior roles at Teradata, a leading data warehousing and analytics company. Their background in managing large-scale, complex data environments directly addresses Web3’s challenges, such as decentralized data handling, performance optimization, and security. This expertise enables Space and Time to design a decentralized platform that meets and anticipates the evolving needs of a decentralized economy.

Addressing Key Challenges in Web3 Data Handling

Space and Time tackles several fundamental problems in Web3 through its technological innovations:

1. Data Interoperability and Fragmentation: Web3’s decentralized nature often results in data fragmentation across multiple blockchains, each with distinct standards and structures. Space and Time’s platform ingests and integrates data from various sources, including blockchains, dApps, and external APIs, enabling comprehensive cross-chain analytics.
2. Scalability and Latency: On-chain data processing is inherently slow and expensive due to gas fees and blockchain throughput limitations. Space and Time’s decentralized HTAP architecture enables off-chain data processing while maintaining cryptographic guarantees, significantly enhancing performance for enterprise-grade applications.
3. Data Integrity and Trust: Traditional analytics platforms, even those designed for blockchain, often depend on centralized servers without tamperproof guarantees. Space and Time’s Proof of SQL protocol addresses this by cryptographically securing all data queries, ensuring the integrity and reliability of results used in dApps and smart contracts.
4. Tamperproof Off-Chain Data Processing: Blockchains ensure on-chain data security, but off-chain data processing remains vulnerable. Space and Time bridges this gap with a decentralized approach, ensuring that off-chain data is as secure and verifiable as on-chain transactions.
5. Economic Security: Existing platforms lack robust incentives for node operators to maintain high performance and data integrity standards. Space and Time’s economic security model, which includes staking mechanisms and random audits, ensures that data services meet stringent requirements, enhancing reliability across the network.

Space and Time’s Technological Innovations

Space and Time’s unique architecture combines several advanced technologies to address these challenges effectively.

1. Proof of SQL: Cryptographically Guaranteed Query Results

Proof of SQL is a novel cryptographic protocol that provides real-time tamperproof guarantees for SQL queries. Unlike conventional SQL engines, which are susceptible to tampering, Proof of SQL uses a verifier-prover mechanism, where each computational step generates a cryptographic proof. This results in a DAG of proofs, ensuring that query results are accurate and untampered.

• Verifier-Prover Interaction: In this setup, gateway nodes act as verifiers, and database clusters function as provers. The verifier generates a commitment (cryptographic digest) of the data, and the prover responds with the query result and a corresponding proof. The verifier checks the evidence against the commitment, and only verified results are delivered, ensuring data integrity at every stage​.
• Pedersen Commitments and Non-Interactive Randomness: Space and Time employ Pedersen commitments for efficient, updatable cryptographic digests. These commitments are combined with non-interactive randomness to produce proofs without multi-round interactions, significantly reducing latency in complex queries​.

2. Decentralized Data Ingestion and Indexing

The data ingestion layer of Space and Time is designed to handle vast and diverse data inputs, including multiple blockchains and external data sources. It employs a tamperproof blockchain indexing pipeline to produce cryptographically secure relational copies of all indexed events, transactions, and blocks.

• Gateway/Validator Layer: This decentralized microservices layer routes transactions and data streams to relevant database clusters. Gateway nodes also update commitments for each data column used during the Proof of SQL verification process. This ensures that data is securely managed and processed throughout the network​
• Multi-Protocol Data Access: Space and Time provides several APIs, including REST APIs, GraphQL APIs, Kafka SDKs for streaming data, and ODBC/JDBC drivers, to facilitate high-speed data access. This flexibility supports a wide range of use cases, from real-time analytics to complex, enterprise-scale data processing​

3. Economic Security and Decentralized Reputation System

Space and Time’s economic model requires node operators to stake significant crypto assets (e.g., 50 ETH) to operate clusters. This staking combines random audits and a decentralized reputation system to maintain high performance and data integrity. Operators who fail audits or deliver poor performance risk slashing, while those who excel receive access to higher-value datasets, creating a strong incentive for maintaining reliability.

• Proof of Storage and Random Query Audits: The platform employs Proof of Storage to verify data persistence and Random Query Audits to ensure query integrity, providing multiple layers of security and ensuring high standards across the network​

Competitors

Space and Time faced a landscape populated by platforms like Glassnode, Dune Analytics, and Chainlink (incubated and spunout of Chainlink). However, these platforms lacked tamperproof data handling, decentralized query verification, or cross-chain data interoperability.

• Glassnode, Nansen, and Dune Analytics: Focused on on-chain analytics with SQL-like querying capabilities, these platforms did not offer cryptographically verifiable query results and relied on centralized servers, limiting their trustworthiness for sensitive Web3 use cases.
• Chainlink and Other Oracles: Chainlink focused on delivering decentralized data feeds to smart contracts, with limited capabilities in complex, high-performance analytics and data integration that Space and Time offered.
• SupraOracles and Other Emerging Platforms: These new entrants sought to provide secure data services but were in the early stages and did not match the level of cross-chain data interoperability or cryptographic guarantees provided by Space and Time.

Space and Time’s approach to decentralized data analytics combines cryptographically secure, high-performance data processing with a decentralized operational model. Its innovations, such as Proof of SQL, a robust economic security system, and flexible data APIs, address core challenges in Web3, making it an essential infrastructure layer for the decentralized future. Dispersion Capital’s investment reflects confidence in the platform’s ability to provide the critical data backbone needed for Web3 applications, solving real and complex problems in decentralized infrastructure. As demand for scalable, secure, and interoperable data solutions grows, Space and Time is well-positioned to lead the evolution of data infrastructure in the Web3 era.