Topology

January 2025

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TL;DR: We built a thing that can make applications on any chain operate in real-time

Topology reimagines the architecture of the world computer. We’re introducing Mandu, an orchestration L1 blockchain which leverages the Distributed Real-time Program primitive to make the ecosystem more performant. Using the Mandu stack, dApps and assets can operate in real-time while remaining on their native blockchain layers.

Why DRP and Mandu

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

For the world computer, blockchains excel as decentralized hard drives, leveraging peer-to-peer networks to process data in an immutable and persistent manner. However, these networks are limited by consensus overhead, lack of application privacy and lack of isolation from global network activities. Topology introduces two key components to enhance the world computer: Distributed Real-time Programs (DRP) a peer-to-peer Internet protocol that acts as world computer’s RAM by enabling ephemeral real-time peer-to-peer computation among local participants, and Mandu, an orchestration layer that directs bidirectional traffic between this RAM and decentralized Hard Drives (blockchains).

RAM was introduced in traditional computers as high-speed temporary storage, due to the CPU being bottlenecked by the sequential access of other storage devices (e.g. magnetic tapes). This enabled computers to run way faster, enabling a completely new set of applications. Without RAM, computers would be limited by the speed of their storage devices.

Mandu and DRP are architected to address the UX problems of blockchain infrastructure. Their integration enables developers to build applications with real-time interactions, no single point of failure, safety against Sybil attacks, and end-to-end encrypted.

Why are we excited about this? With the addition of RAM-like structures, the world computer could enable entirely new classes of real-time decentralized applications, without making concessions to decentralization.

We envision to make the world computer performant, and even more competitive than existing Web 2.0 options.

Public programmable blockchains as hard drives

Ethereum was the first blockchain that was practically programmable. After the launch in 2015, the vision of the world computer was born, a vision for uncensorable interactions on a massively global scale. This would be made possible because Ethereum, and most public blockchains, function like a "public decentralized shared execution environment".

Indeed, a public programmable blockchain works like a stateless CPU running on a stateful “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 will exist 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.