Grassroots platforms with atomic transactions: social graphs, cryptocurrencies, and democratic federations

Shapiro, Ehud (2026) Grassroots platforms with atomic transactions: social graphs, cryptocurrencies, and democratic federations. In: Yasumoto, Keiichi, Keidar, Idit, Yamaguchi, Hirozumi, Silvestri, Simone and Gramoli, Vincent, (eds.) ICDCN '26: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking. Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, 71 - 81. ISBN 9798400718885

Text (3772290.3772309) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (651kB)

Abstract

Grassroots platforms aim to offer an egalitarian alternative to global platforms — centralized/autocratic (Facebook etc.) and decentralized/plutocratic (Bitcoin etc.) alike. Whereas global platforms can have only a single instance—one Facebook, one Bitcoin—grassroots platforms can have multiple instances that emerge and operate independently of each other and of any global resource except the network, and can interoperate and coalesce into ever-larger instances once interconnected, potentially (but not necessarily) forming a single instance. Key grassroots platforms include grassroots social graphs, grassroots social networks, grassroots cryptocurrencies, and grassroots federations. Previously, grassroots platforms were defined formally and proven grassroots using unary 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 multiagent transition system to include atomic transactions and revisit the notion of grassroots platforms within this new foundation. We present concise specifications of key grassroots platforms using atomic transactions: befriending and unfriending for grassroots social graphs, coin swaps for grassroots cryptocurrencies, and communities forming, joining, and leaving a federation for grassroots federations. We prove a general theorem that a platform specified by atomic transactions that are 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 crisp mathematical foundation for grassroots platforms and a solid and clear starting point from which their implementation can commence.

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	© 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s)
Divisions:	Mathematics Data Science Institute
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HF Commerce
Date Deposited:	08 Jan 2026 14:33
Last Modified:	13 Jan 2026 09:48
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/130907

Actions (login required)

View Item