Hey, guiltygyoza, thanks for submitting your project here! Could you share some ELI5 explanations of what you're working on and why you decided to work on solving this particular problem? :)
The Open Metaverse needs to be an open "medium" for anyone/any agent to deploy, discover and access programs that are massively concurrent multi-user. Moreover, such a medium should be embodied in the form of a protocol in the sense of an Internet / distributed systems protocol, not a blockchain protocol that relies on a singular native currency to sustain. Blockchain (replicated state machines over Byzantine consensus) popularizes the idea of such a medium but it's limited in scalability because of strict consistency (CAP theorem). Also, the Bitcoin blockchain relies on BTC price staying above certain levels for security. The Ethereum blockchain relies on ETH native yield surpassing operating costs to sustain. They are singular global systems. Instead, what we really need is a protocol for grassroot systems to spawn with loose coupling. For grassroot systems, check [Shapiro 2024] The question becomes: can we run multi-user stateful programs over open P2P network in a different way without the costs and scalability limitations of Byzantine consensus based systems? How far can we go in terms of # of concurrent users and access latency / availability for such programs? Topology Protocol leverages the properties of BFT-CRDT [Kleppmann 2022] and offers an object system abstraction (which programmers are familiar with) and uses a PubSub mechanism underlying for discovery and information dissemination across open P2P network. Cross platform access to shared massively-concurrent live-programmable virtual worlds are possible by default with Topology Protocol - as long as there exists protocol implementations for each of the platform (mobile, console, browser, desktop etc) [Shapiro 2024] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.04391 [Kleppmann 2022] https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/bft-crdt-papoc22.pdf
Thanks for the thorough explanation. The more "Internet-like than blockchain-like architecture" makes sense to me. Are there any apps you'd particularly want to see built on top of Topology?
auction houses, mixer of concurrent sequences of txs (mergers of Application Specific Sequencing), collaborative editing of X (X $\in$ {painting, music, 3D models, scientific simulations}), agar.io with 1M concurrent players, maple story