Of RIPA and the Blockchain Overlords

On 18 Jan, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted on X that despite “super decentralization,” 49% Byzantine tolerance, etc., a protocol ultimately fails all three tests:

It’s not trustless because you have to trust a small class of high priests who tell you what properties the protocol has

It doesn’t pass the walkaway test because if existing client teams go away, it’s extremely hard for new teams to get up to the same level of quality

It’s not self-sovereign because if even the most technical people can’t inspect and understand the thing, it’s not fully yours

These were some of the (many) pain points that led to the conception of Gajumaru. Gajumaru’s resource layer, Groot, is planned to have its core protocol and reference implementation completed in the first half of 2027, and at that point public mining begins.

The switch to uncontrolled public mining for Groot carries profound significance, as this is the point at which the protocol for Groot will become essentially set in stone and unchangeable.

From that point on, Groot will enter a sort of “hands-off” mode where governance, as we now know from the Bitcoin experience, will be practically impossible. Instead of straining against this inevitable trend, this is part of the Gajumaru plan to provide a base resource that is fully trustless and resistant to institutional capture. This is Gajumaru’s way of protecting the monetary supply from subversion.

Innovation does not stop, however, as Associate Chains (ACs) within the Gajumaru system, all of which share Groot’s currency and base protocol, are free to pursue innovation, and are only prohibited from influencing the supply of Gajus.

Keeping the resource layer bare, simple, and solid, minimizes complications and risks of protocol breaks associated with complexity. This also means that different development teams can add, customize, and tweak features as much as they want all without ever messing with the core layer. There will be no forks or protocol updates to Groot itself, so “backwards compatibility” and protocol bloat are a problem that will not affect Groot.  (While forks are feasible in theory, they are practically impossible due to insurmountable coordination challenges and conflicts of interest. This trend is impossible to combat in a PoW setting, and is therefore leveraged as an anti-governance feature.)

Once, the hands-off point starts, Groot will be fully uncontrolled–it cannot be influenced, not even by those who made it–no “high priests” to lord over what it does or doesn’t do. All it does is mint, move, record. Nothing more.

Additionally, this answers the “walkaway test” in Vitalik’s second point: even if the creators of Gajumaru disappeared, it wouldn’t matter. There is no development team needed to continue work on Groot–there is nothing more to do with it beyond the freeze. Implementation efficiency, competing implementations, ports to new hardware, sure, but all implementations of Groot simply become peers in the network.

Finally, unlike Ethereum, there will be no “older versions” for developers to worry about–there will only be one version of the protocol that Groot follows, starting from the hands-off point. The rate of change from that point will be exactly zero–since additions to features are done on an entirely separate part of the architecture. Independent development teams can make all the changes they want on their own associate chain without affecting the resource layer for everyone else.

For those interested in a deeper dive, Gajumaru follows the RIPA architecture: Resource, Infrastructure, Platform, Application. You can find more resources about the Gajumaru here.

Below, you will also find a layman’s explanation of RIPA.