Stories from Themelio’s future

A glimpse of a Themelio-powered, off-chain composable world

At Themelio, we’re building a new, clean-slate L1 focused on endogenous trust as a foundation for an ecosystem of non-blockchain decentralized protocols. But that’s not simply because we want to build cool tech. Off-chain composability with Themelio as a root of trust enables the creation of a much better internet.

Yet precisely because Themelio is very different from most of web3 or web2, what Themelio enables is almost entirely new applications — not “blockchains + insert web2 app here”. The best way to illustrate this might be to tell some stories from the future…

Alice, the self-accrediting journalist

The year is 2030. Alice is an independent investigative journalist who edits AnonNews, a secretive website that reports newsworthy scoops from the most sensitive of environments. Despite it being the work of a single person, AnonNews has developed a reputation for being one of the most reliable conduits of information from hard-to-access sources, and have broken multiple stories that have had a significant public impact.

But a fundamental problem is: how can Alice establish her credibility while staying anonymous, and most importantly, keeping her sources safe? The answer lies in a prediction market on AnonNews, where anyone can buy a contract that pays out a fixed sum of money only if the news stories eventually pan out, after enough time has passed for it to be safe to reveal the “sources and methods” behind a particular scoop. This market’s complete anonymity allows insiders to safely bet large sums on the story’s truth, driving up the market price and signaling the story’s reliability.

AnonNews’s most influential story, on the major tech company Omega’s secret collaboration with the despotic Obristani surveillance state, came with this market:

By 2050, will the Omega-Obristan story be considered credible by at least 3 out of the 5 most widely-circulating history encyclopedias, as a result of later revelations by AnonNews?

• YES: this contract pays 1 MEL
• NO: this contract pays 0 MEL

When it first opened, the market price fluctuated wildly as new information about the story trickled in. Market manipulation from Obristan’s massive propaganda machine was no doubt also active, at one point driving the price below 0.2 MEL and fueling rumors that AnonNews might finally be discredited. But as independent sources began to corroborate the story, and greater sums of money entered the market, the market price quickly stabilized upwards, reaching a resounding 0.94 MEL for “YES” within just a year.

And the biggest bets for YES came from Alice and her sources, landing them a tidy sum when the story was finally vindicated years later. Ironically, the very prospect of betting against and prevailing against market manipulators attempting to influence public opinion is a huge financial motivation for AnonNews’s sources to take the risks necessary to get the story out, and one of the most important factors behind AnonNews’s success.

Bob, MMO gamer turned AI+UI startup founder

Bob is the founder of BobCorp, a rapidly growing technology startup. Its flagship product is Handle, a revolutionary, client-side system for automatically optimizing augmented reality user interfaces based on usage patterns. By 2037, Handle has become the go-to technology for generating user-adaptive AR interfaces, integrated into everything from industrial volumetric displays to contact-lens computers.

Bob’s journey started back in high school, when he was an avid player of Ostomo, the open-source science fiction MMORPG that almost single-handedly defined the VR gaming world of the 2030s. The primary attraction of Ostomo is its extensive user-customizability — nearly everything in the game universe is crafted and traded by players, a feature foreshadowed in early games like Minecraft and Eve Online. Moreover, even the software supporting Ostomo, from the clients on players’ VR consoles to the backend running on a decentralized network of servers, is maintained by players and open to individual modification.

Handle’s predecessor is “Bob’s UI”, a client mod that added a machine-learning user interface to the game that makes it much easier for players to navigate Ostomo’s vast assortment of features and build complex in-game structures and vehicles. More controversially, it offered an intelligent “strategic overlay” that let players instantly spot valuable resources, enemy players, and other items of interest, while sharing it in real time with teammates. Some considered this “cheating”, and indeed in the centralized MMOs of the past, the massive advantages a user had over someone without the mod would be “game-breaking” and lead to a flurry of banned accounts.

Even in Ostomo, for a time Bob’s UI was banned on around 15% of the servers. But eventually, Bob’s UI became a de facto standard used by almost all players, and Ostomo’s community simply adapted to a different, and arguably more fun game. Space combat, for instance, turned from rather boring searches for hidden enemies often described as “submarine warfare in space” to intensely strategic struggles of resource management, large-scale tactics, and information aggregation, fought as much in Bob’s UI’s logistics visualizations as in spacecraft cockpits.

As demand for his mod grew, Bob was eventually rewarded with not just fame within the community, but financial success. Funds to develop bigger and better features for Bob’s UI seemed inexhaustible, and some large player guilds even paid Bob to develop custom “top secret” versions designed to give them an edge over their in-game competition.

Eventually, as AR technology developed, Bob realized that his “strategic overlay” could be more than just a VR game mod, but the foundation of a new way of interacting with real-world technology. And so, with funding from his profits developing Bob’s UI, he founded BobCorp and developed its world-changing Handle technology.

How can we make these stories a reality?

Alice and Bob clearly inhabit quite a different internet from ours — one where individuals can arrange incentives to bring out everyone’s potential. Alice designs a system where the insiders who take the risks receive the rewards, while everyone else can gain confidence in AnonNews based on reasoning about these incentives. Bob was propelled to perfect Bob’s UI because the Ostomo ecosystem incentivizes players to serve other players.

This requires an ecosystem of interoperable, secure, and decentralized protocols that we currently don’t have. For example, Alice must have a bullet-proof anonymous communication and payment protocol, secure enough that her sources aren’t afraid to leak their identities by betting lots of money on a story. Ostomo needs a decentralized protocol that coordinates and funds gamers like Bob to develop technology and run infrastructure that enforces game rules. Decentralized and trustworthy arbitration agencies are also necessary both for settling the AnonNews market and for resolving disputes in Ostomo. In turn, we need some sort of a decentralized reputation system to establish their credibility.

None of these protocols are blockchains or smart contracts, and neither AnonNews nor Ostomo’s users would ever need to open Metamask to send an on-chain transaction. Yet they are firmly “web3” protocols, offering features that crucially depend on the endogenous, incentive-based trust that only blockchains offer.

So at the heart of Alice and Bob’s world, there must be a blockchain with not only strong endogenous trust but a paradigm of off-chain composability. This is a rich ecosystem achieved not through piecing together on-chain smart contracts with composable interfaces, but through a layered stack full of non-blockchain protocols that use the blockchain as a root of trust. In a subsequent blogpost, we’ll explore the deep technology tree of an off-chain composable world, starting with the root of trust, Themelio, and basic protocols like ZK-rollups and payment channel networks, and ending with complex user-facing applications like AnonNews and Ostomo.