Grassroots Consensus

2025-05-25

AI Summary

Existing consensus protocols inadequately address the needs of grassroots digital platforms—such as sovereign democratic communities and community banks—for lightweight, efficient, and decentralized agreement mechanisms. Method: We propose a novel blockchain consensus protocol tailored for digital social contracts, built upon the blocklace data structure. It uniquely embeds constitutional rules and amendment procedures directly into the consensus layer, enabling decentralized modeling of social contracts. The protocol integrates UDP-based transport optimization and fault-tolerant algorithms designed for partially synchronous networks. Contribution/Results: Our design achieves silence-optimality, strong responsiveness, cross-throughput efficiency, and grassroots deployability. It outperforms state-of-the-art protocols under both low- and high-throughput regimes while maintaining simplicity and scalability. To our knowledge, this is the first consensus protocol to unify institutional programmability, network adaptability, and grassroots deployability at the consensus layer.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies

Abstract

Grassroots platforms aim to offer an egalitarian alternative to global platforms -- centralized/autocratic and decentralized/plutocratic alike. Within the grassroots architecture, consensus is needed to realize platforms that employ digital social contracts, which are like smart contracts except that they are among people not accounts and are executed by these people's smartphones not by high-performance servers controlled by parties outside to the contract. Key envisioned grassroots platforms include sovereign democratic digital communities and federations, community banks and their grassroots cryptocurrencies, and digital cooperatives. The grassroots architecture can benefit from a consensus protocol that is (i) quiescent, (ii) efficient during low- and high-throughput, (iii) responsive, (iv) blocklace-based, (v) UDP-ready, and (vi) grassroots. The Grassroots Consensus protocol addresses all these requirements while having competitive performance in both low- and high-throughput scenarios and being one of the most concise and elegant consensus protocols for partial synchrony. It achieves that by building on two cutting-edge consensus protocols -- the quiescent high-performance Morpheus and the blocklace-based Cordial Miners, improving the latter's dissemination protocol and making it UDP-ready, and extending the protocol with a constitution and a constitutional amendment component, making it grassroots.

Problem

• Develop egalitarian grassroots platforms as alternatives to centralized/decentralized systems
• Create a consensus protocol for digital social contracts executed by smartphones
• Design a quiescent, efficient, and responsive blocklace-based grassroots consensus protocol

Innovation

• Uses digital social contracts among people
• Blocklace-based consensus protocol
• UDP-ready and grassroots architecture