Grassroots Platforms with Atomic Transactions: Social Graphs, Cryptocurrencies, and Democratic Federations

Centralized platforms concentrate power, monetize social attention, and frequently produce perverse incentives. Grassroots platforms attempt the opposite: empower communities to coordinate, transact, and govern themselves at scale while avoiding single points of control. Combining decentralized social graphs, local currencies, atomic settlement mechanisms, and federated governance can enable communities to run their own interoperable social-economies with strong user control. This paper describes a practical architecture and analyzes the technical, social, and economic tradeoffs involved.