Over the past few years, the Web3 industry has been discussing public blockchain performance, transaction speeds, and gas fees, but few have focused on another fundamental question: How trustworthy is the data that on-chain finance relies on?

Blockchain can ensure that records added on-chain are difficult to tamper with, but it cannot automatically guarantee the accuracy of off-chain data, nor can it prove that every data query and computation is correct.

And that is exactly what @Space and Time aims to do.

1. What exactly is Space and Time?

Space and Time is a blockchain network that provides verifiable data services for on-chain finance.

In 2022, the project raised $20 million in strategic funding in a round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture capital fund.

But in my view, its technical direction is more worth paying attention to than its investors.

Space and Time aims to use cryptography to enable applications not only to access data, but also to verify whether the results of data queries have been calculated correctly.

Its core technology is called Proof of SQL.

It may sound complicated, but an example can make it easier to understand.

Suppose you own a store that sells 100,000 orders in a month.

You ask your accountant to calculate the month’s revenue, and they tell you it was 5 million yuan.

Normally, you can only trust the accountant or recheck every single order yourself.

But with a verifiable computation mechanism like Proof of SQL, the accountant gives you not only a result, but also a proof that can be verified mathematically.

You don’t need to recalculate every order to check whether the result was computed according to the specified rules and based on verified data.

That’s the core idea behind Space and Time’s technology.

Of course, this does not mean it can automatically determine whether all the original business data is genuine. Its focus is on making supported data queries and computations verifiable.

2. Why does AI need Space and Time?

AI can already help us write articles, analyze market trends, and write code.

In the future, AI agents may even participate directly in on-chain financial activities.

Suppose you have an AI assistant and ask it:

“Analyze which DeFi protocol had the fastest growth in fee revenue over the past 30 days.”

AI needs to retrieve historical transaction records from different protocols, calculate changes in revenue, and then compare them.

Here’s the problem.

If a data provider mistakenly reports $2 million in revenue instead of $1 million, even a highly capable AI could reach the wrong conclusion.

Space and Time enables applications to obtain query results accompanied by cryptographic proofs, so they can verify whether the relevant calculations are correct.

AI analyzes the data, while Space and Time provides a verifiable basis for data computations.

This does not guarantee that AI’s final judgment will be correct, but it can help address issues caused by opaque underlying data computations.

3. Why does RWA also need verifiable data?

RWA stands for the tokenization of real-world assets.

Put simply, it means recording and transferring rights related to real-world assets, such as stocks and bonds, in the form of tokens.

Suppose an institution tokenizes a fund and issues on-chain tokens representing shares in the fund.

Investors may want to know three things:

What assets does the fund hold? How much cash flow have those assets generated? How is the fund’s net asset value (NAV) calculated?

This information often comes from different databases, and it does not all naturally exist on the blockchain.

For example, a tokenized stock is traded in three liquidity pools. The platform needs to aggregate transaction data from all three pools to calculate the total trading volume.

If only a final figure is provided, users have little way of knowing whether anything was counted twice or left out along the way.

Space and Time can query and aggregate supported data, then generate cryptographic proofs to help applications verify the computation results.

It is important to note that proving a computation is correct does not guarantee that the assets actually exist, nor does it constitute a legal audit.

But for RWA applications that need to process large volumes of financial records, verifiable computation is an important capability.

4. What can DeFi do with it?

Here’s another example that’s closer to everyday users.

Suppose a DeFi platform is preparing to introduce a membership program:

Users who have interacted with the protocol more than 20 times in the past 90 days can receive a discount on transaction fees.

It sounds straightforward, but the smart contract needs to query a large volume of historical transactions to determine who qualifies.

Putting all historical data on the main chain and recalculating everything would be not only complex, but potentially expensive as well.

Space and Time can process these historical data queries off-chain, then provide proofs through Proof of SQL, allowing smart contracts to verify the query results and use them to enforce the relevant rules.

This allows protocols to design richer features, such as user tiers, trading fee discounts, and eligibility for rewards points.

It does not set the rules for DeFi protocols; it helps them verify the data computations needed to enforce those rules.

5. So, what is SXT used for?

At this point, you may be wondering: if Space and Time is a data network, what is the purpose of SXT?

In practice, SXT is tied to the network’s operations.

Developers need to pay the corresponding network workload fees to perform operations such as writing and querying data on the network.

On the other hand, $SXT is also used for staking on the network, supporting validators as they help maintain network security.

You can think of it this way: Space and Time provides data computation and verification services, while $SXT is the native token that supports these network activities.

Finally, my thoughts

Over the past few years, Web3 has primarily competed on transaction performance.

But as AI agents, stablecoins, RWAs, and DeFi continue to develop, financial applications will have increasingly demanding data requirements.

A financial system needs more than just fast transaction processing. It also needs to explain where its data comes from, whether the computation is reliable, and whether the results can be independently verified.

That is the technical direction Space and Time has chosen.

Whether it will achieve widespread adoption remains to be seen. That will depend on developer usage, network performance, and real-world applications.

But one thing is worth considering:

If blockchain makes transaction records harder to tamper with, Space and Time is working to make data computation results verifiable as well.

In the future, on-chain finance should offer more than just a number.

More importantly, it should be possible to prove how that number was calculated.

Paid promotion disclosure: This article is sponsored content for Space and Time (SXT) and does not constitute investment advice.

Buying SXT involves risk. We recommend doing your own research (DYOR) and consulting a professional before purchasing SXT or any other cryptocurrency.#SXT