The Goldilocks consensus problem

Farcaster has developed a new consensus model called the deltagraph, which combines blockchains with CRDTs to aim for social-network scale while staying decentralized. The authors say existing federated and blockchain models trade off decentralization against cost and speed: federation is simple but tends toward centralization, while blockchains are slow and expensive for social data. Deltagraphs avoid global ordering by letting deltas merge in any order, and they use rent to limit storage, with Farcaster's blockchain handling payments. The article reports over 300,000 paying users and 1,000 nodes serving 5 million deltas every day.