Today, the digital realm is dominated by two architectures: Autocratic digital platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Amazon marketplace, Uber, Airbnb) and plutocratic cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum), creating perhaps the greatest inequality of power and wealth in modern history. In this talk we will present our work towards a third alternative: An architecture that is grassroots and can in principle support egalitarian and democratic alternatives to digital platforms and to mainstream cryptocurrencies.

The core of the architecture is a grassroots consensus protocol stack, designed for serverless peer-to-peer execution by personal devices, i.e., smartphones. The protocol stack incorporates: (1) Grassroots dissemination, in which dissemination occurs only among friends, and only of blocks by persons both friends follow. It is powerful enough to support Twitter-like and WhatsApp-like serverless social networking. (2) Leader-based equivocation exclusion, sufficient to realize sovereign cryptocurrencies, which can support the grassroots formation of digital economies without external capital or credit. (3) Grassroots consensus, an alternative to permissioned and permissionless consensus protocols in which extant participants determine whether and how to admit new participants according to the protocol's constitution. The key envisioned application of grassroots consensus is grassroots social contracts serving democratic Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Grassroots social contracts, unlike smart contracts and DAOs, are executed by their participants, not by third-party miners, and thus provide grassroots foundations for democratic DAOs that are sovereign and truly autonomous.

The protocol stack employs the blocklace - a DAG-like partially-ordered generalization of the totally-ordered blockchain. The construction so far has been mathematical. We will discuss plans for its implementation.