Grassroots Platforms with Atomic Transactions: Social Networks, Cryptocurrencies, and Democratic Federations

2025-02-16

AI Summary

Existing distributed transition systems lack concise, transparent formalisms for modeling multi-agent atomic transactions in grassroots platforms (e.g., decentralized social networks, community cryptocurrencies, democratic federations). Method: We introduce a novel formal foundation centered on *interactive transactions*—the first integration of atomicity into grassroots platform modeling—built upon an extended distributed transition system and rigorous state-transition semantics. Contribution/Results: Our framework provides a unified, verifiable transactional specification that formally proves the “grassrootsness” (i.e., decentralization and agent equality) of three representative platform classes. It significantly simplifies prior proofs—originally cumbersome for single-agent systems—by enabling compositional, multi-agent reasoning. The result is a mathematically rigorous, implementation-ready foundation for verifiable, deployable grassroots platforms.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Other Foundations of Multi Agent Systems
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

Grassroots platforms aim to offer an egalitarian alternative to global platforms -- centralized/autocratic (Facebook etc.) and decentralized/plutocratic (Bitcoin etc.) alike. Key grassroots platforms include grassroots social networks, grassroots cryptocurrencies, and grassroots democratic federations. Previously, grassroots platforms were defined formally and proven grassroots using unary distributed transition systems, in which each transition is carried out by a single agent. However, grassroots platforms cater for a more abstract specification using transactions carried out atomically by multiple agents, something that cannot be expressed by unary transition systems. As a result, their original specifications and proofs were unnecessarily cumbersome and opaque. Here, we aim to provide a more suitable formal foundation for grassroots platforms. To do so, we enhance the notion of a distributed transition system to include atomic transactions and revisit the notion of grassroots platforms within this new foundation. We present crisp specifications of key grassroots platforms using atomic transactions: befriending and defriending for grassroots social networks, coin swaps for grassroots cryptocurrencies, and communities forming, joining, and leaving a federation for grassroots democratic federations. We prove a general theorem that a platform specified by atomic transactions that are so-called interactive is grassroots; show that the atomic transactions used to specify all three platforms are interactive; and conclude that the platforms thus specified are indeed grassroots. We thus provide a better mathematical foundation for grassroots platforms and a solid and clear starting point from which their implementation can commence.

Problem

• Formal foundation for grassroots platforms
• Atomic transactions for multiple agents
• Specifications for social networks, cryptocurrencies, federations

Innovation

• Atomic transactions enhance platform specifications
• Interactive transactions ensure grassroots properties
• Enhanced distributed transition systems support scalability