Topology

January, 2025

For the world computer, blockchains excel as decentralized hard drives, great at global persistence but facing inherent scaling limitations in the form of a trilemma. Topology introduces two key components to enhance the world computer: DRP, an Internet protocol that acts as world computer’s RAM by enabling ephemeral real-time peer-to-peer computation, and Mandu, an orchestration blockchain that connects this RAM with decentralized hard drives. These protocols complement the current infrastructure, working in harmony with L1s and L2s alike. Their integration enables developers to build high-performance applications with real-time interaction, end-to-end encryption, and no single point of failure, leapfrogging the blockchain trilemma and advancing the original cypherpunk vision. Through these innovations, Topology reimagines the architecture of the world computer.

The world computer vision

The idea of the world computer is to create a single programmable medium where code and data live and operate correctly forever without centralized intermediaries, enabling trustless and censorship-resistant coordination at global scale.

The World Computer serves as a defensive foundation for humanity's shared interest that transcends geopolitical boundaries. It is designed to resist centralized control and coercion while empowering individual agency. It provides a resilient platform that remains accessible even in the face of powerful actors. Anyone with Internet access can participate, creating opportunities for livelihood, contribution, and community formation that are protected from both corporate and state-level capture.

Public programmable blockchains are hard drives

The world computer vision was originated from Ethereum, which imagined itself as a public decentralized shared hard drive [1]. Indeed, a public programmable blockchain works like a stateless CPU running on a hard drive that allows only sequential writes.

A decentralized hard drive typically exhibits the following properties:

1. Persistence: Global persistence is guaranteed. Blockchains typically offer the guarantee that any data sent onchain is persisted indefinitely.
2. Lock-heavy block time: Transactions are total ordered and batched into blocks by global consensus, acting as a single global lock. As a result, transaction latency is dominated by the overhead of this lock.
3. A single shared transaction log. All transactions related to any part of its state are collectively recorded in a single shared log, typically in the form a merkle tree. To trustlessly recreate the latest state of any particular smart contract requires syncing and verifying the entirety of this log.
4. Subject to blockchain trilemma: As chains pursue performance improvements, they trend toward centralized block production, where computation occurs in specialized nodes (”thick servers”) operated professionally, while most end users run “thin clients” that access onchain state via REST endpoints.

The primary limitation of these hard drives is to scale in decentralized ways. To achieve higher throughput and lower latency, blockchains would require fewer and more powerful machines to fully participate in the creation and verification of large blocks, which creates a centralization vector.

Faster and modular hard drives are not enough

Multiple base layer blockchains in the recent years have pushed the performance boundary. For example, Solana achieves higher throughput through its proof-of-history mechanism, parallel transaction processing, and higher minimum validator spec requirements. Move-based chains like Sui and Aptos leverage newer consensus algorithms like Hotstuff [2] and Mysticeti [3]. However, these approaches do not address the fundamental limitation of blockchains: they are subject to the trilemma where at a given security level, design approaches to achieve higher scalability necessarily reduce decentralization. Moreover, these chains operate on transparent global state where all data and computation are publicly visible, making privacy preservation difficult without additional cryptographic techniques.

The modular blockchain architecture, and layer-2 rollups in particular, offer a path forward by separating the system into specialized layers - consensus, data availability, execution, and settlement. This layered approach enables rollups to pursue performance optimization while relying on the base layer for security and censorship-resistance. At the time of writing, there are more than 50 production rollups on the market.