Protocol Berg v2: Thomas Hsueh - Coordination Avoidance: Rethinking Decentr. Netw. Beyond Consensus

Thu, Oct 2, 2025, 12:00 AM

Blockchains today are decentralized networks of fat servers. Rollups also operate on fat servers for sequencing and proving. The vast majority of users of these systems run thin clients that always interact through these servers, an architecture that (1) fails to leverage the local compute capability (2) rely on (decentralised) middlemen for interaction, necessitating transaction fees for middlemen incentivisation. This talk introduces coordination-avoidance as a paradigm shift in decentralized computing. Instead of enforcing global consensus, coordination-avoidance enables direct P2P execution among users that operate local-first clients. This paradigm unlocks a new design space for applications that benefit from decentralization, high responsiveness, and safety at the same time. I will discuss how DRP (Distributed Real-time Programs), a new Internet protocol, constructs a new kind of BFT state from consensus-free P2P networks. This approach enables applications with novel economic models that are impractical for any existing client-server architectures, regardless if the servers are decentralised. Protocol Berg v2 12-13 June 2025 Berlin https://v2.protocol.berlin