Space and Time

Nate Holiday and Scott Dykstra say they founded Space and Time in 2022 around a practical gap: decentralized applications could read a blockchain, but joining that history with application data was too expensive for a smart contract. The team ended the year with a controlled release and funding led by Framework Ventures and Microsoft’s M12.

In 2023 the product entered beta and Jay White’s Proof of SQL became public. White, a co-founder and the project’s research lead, supplied the technical hinge: a database could calculate offchain and give a verifier compact evidence that the calculation matched committed data.

Proof of SQL does not put an entire database inside a smart contract. Indexers collect data, validators sign commitments to table state, and a prover evaluates a supported SQL query. A verifier then checks the zero-knowledge proof without rerunning the whole query.

That establishes computation and integrity relative to the commitment. It does not prove that an external price, identity or business record was true before ingestion. Validator agreement and the quality of the underlying source still matter. The public repository also says not every SQL function is supported, so ‘verifiable SQL’ is a defined subset rather than a promise about arbitrary queries.

On March 26, 2025 the project introduced SXT Chain as a live testnet indexing six networks and supporting tamper-resistant tables and Proof of SQL. The same announcement placed crypto query payments, EVM and client verification, community-run indexers and a permissionless database on the roadmap. Those sentences describe different states and should not be collapsed into one launch claim.

By May the Foundation said public mainnet had launched and opened a time-limited Genesis validator program. Mainnet v2 followed on November 5 with custom offchain tables for institutional data. The February 2026 economics paper describes live workloads being metered and settled in SXT, while the public proof and node repositories show continuing development rather than a finished decentralization story.

A query proof is mathematics; SXT is the economic coordination layer around it. Clients pay SXT for queries, insertions and verifiable computation. Validators stake it behind availability and honest commitments, delegators can share fee compensation, and misconduct or poor service can trigger slashing. Table owners may receive fees when their data is queried.

Those roles should not be turned into a guaranteed yield. The whitepaper describes fee flows and temporary emissions, and its 50% table-owner example is illustrative rather than a fixed holder entitlement. An ordinary token balance does not itself run a prover, make its owner a validator or promise revenue.

The Ethereum token was minted once at five billion. The published allocation assigned 51.7% to community programs, 25.9% to investors and 22.4% to the team. Team and investor tokens follow a four-year schedule with 15% at month 12; ecosystem development unlocks over four years from launch. Although all community-reward tokens were called unlocked on day zero, only 375 million—7.5%—were described as available then, a warning that unlock and circulation are not synonyms.

The verified contract contains no later mint or upgrade function, but it is not without administration. A 4-of-5 Safe holds the default-admin and pauser roles, can change role membership and can stop transfers. ERC20Votes supplies delegation and historical vote balances, yet the reviewed sources do not identify a Governor that converts those balances into binding protocol control. SXT gives network-use functions; it does not document equity, redemption or ownership of Space and Time.

SXT also crosses networks through a different control surface. The Base contract has maxSupply zero, meaning unlimited locally. The same 4-of-5 Safe is its owner, CCIP admin, active minter and active burner; the CCIP pool can also mint and burn. Five billion is therefore a global accounting invariant that depends on Safe and bridge operations, not a limit enforced by the Base contract.