Beyond Appchains? Fruit Stands, Casinos, and Local Consensus

A shift toward a more modular design is currently playing out in the blockchain landscape. More and more, we’re seeing data, computation, settlement, and consensus becoming untangled and tackled more explicitly, often by different players (and layers).

This move towards a modular stack invites exploration into a topic that I find particularly interesting and worthy of debate – the idea of ‘modular consensus.’

In a recent article, my co-author Brandon and I argue that embracing modular consensus can help foster a more accessible and expressive Ethereum ecosystem. The key is to reduce demand for computational resources needed to verify the global state.

We briefly explore the benefits and tradeoffs of four different consensus “universes”:

• Global Consensus: all applications run together in the L1 same universe
• Sharded Consensus: some applications run together in a parallel universe to escape overcrowding in the L1 universe
• Appchains/Local Consensus: each application runs in its own universe
• CPU-Specific Chains (Beyond Appchains): each application can summon multiple universes

The spectrum of consensus locality

Ultimately, we conclude that for the Ethereum ecosystem to become truly inclusive, we should consciously design systems that empower DApps and users to choose an optimal level of consensus locality based on their own decentralization, security, computation, composability, and financial considerations.

If you’re interested in diving deeper, you can check out our article here:

https://medium.com/cartesi/bananas-casinos-local-consensus-in-a-modular-stack-969f44d9b23

Or, if you’d just like to get your toes wet, you can check out a Twitter thread summary here:

https://twitter.com/ERC_Brandon/status/1600251595349839875

We believe this topic is worthy of further exploration and would love some community feedback!

Cheers!