But what if we could harness the power of AI within the blockchain? Could we enable cutting-edge AI applications to blockchain while providing AI with a more decentralized and trustless infrastructure? The challenge lies in reconciling the fundamental mismatch between blockchain's infrastructure and these emerging use cases.

The AI pipeline is highly complex, resource-intensive, and involves a broad ecosystem of participants: users contributing and labeling training data, GPU clusters running distributed training algorithms for large language models (LLMs), specialists fine-tuning base models, and edge devices handling real-time inference for user queries. Additionally, modern AI agents rely on real-time interaction to function effectively.

However, blockchain’s block dissemination and finality latency create significant obstacles for practical AI agents. More critically, current blockchain value distribution models fail to fairly recognize the contributions of various AI participants, leading to inequitable value attribution. Since most AI operations occur off-chain, there is currently no trust-minimized infrastructure to support fair value attribution for AI workflows.

Hetu and ORA are addressing these limitations by reimagining blockchain infrastructure to meet the demands of AI. Today, we are excited to announce our partnership to build a scalable and decentralized infrastructure for AI, with a focus on advancing scientific research.

Hetu is a Layer 2 solution for Ethereum that introduces an innovative "Proof of Causality Work" mechanism. This groundbreaking approach integrates natural causality relationships into the blockchain, overcoming traditional limitations. Hetu’s design focuses on a causality-driven, trust-minimized system, replacing the conventional sequential global ordering of transactions with a scalable and verifiable partial ordering framework.

This model is particularly well-suited for resource-intensive workflows, such as AI and decentralized science, as it delivers scalability and efficiency without compromising trust.

Moreover, Hetu’s mechanism ensures fair revenue distribution among contributors, allocating rewards based on the significance and weight of their contributions. 

ORA is the protocol for Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). The original creator of fundamental AI assets in Crypto, including tokenized models, agents and inference assets. This makes $ORA the unit of intelligence and the medium of exchange for AI. ORA invented opML and opAgent framework to enable large AI models and perpetual Agents to run on blockchain with verifiability

At the core of ORA’s offering is its AI Oracle, powered by the Optimistic Machine Learning (opML) framework. This ensures that AI-generated inferences are transparent, auditable, and verifiable—making them resistant to manipulation. Without verifiable AI, decentralized wallets and protocols cannot safely integrate crucial AI-powered features, such as security alerts, without compromising the core values that define web3.

Through our partnership, Hetu and ORA will:

1. Develop Verifiable Agent Frameworks: Combine opML for ownership and contribution verification with an ID-based reputation system, ensuring transparent protection of property rights.

2. Build AI Oracle Agents: Establish a trustless bridge between digital marketing automation and legal compliance through verification, seamlessly integrating AI into decentralized workflows. This vertical enterprise service within the Web3 industry holds strong revenue potential.

3. Optimize AI Ecosystems: Implement proof-of-causality mechanisms and cross-platform protocols to optimize machine learning processes while integrating social marketing capabilities, ensuring proper value attribution within the collabORAtive ecosystem.

By uniting blockchain and AI, Hetu and ORA are paving the way for a decentralized future that supports scientific research, innovation, and equitable collabORAtion.

We seem more interested in thinking of the world in binaries of on-chain or off-chain rather than building “holistically towards a more free and open society and economy, where the different parts – technological, social, and economic – fit into each other.”

To truly integrate blockchain’s ideals into every aspect of human experience – technological, social, and economic – we propose a move away from pure objectivity, towards intersubjectivity – the shared understanding that emerges from interactions between different entities.

This shift aligns perfectly with the nature of hyper-scalable heterogeneous distributed systems. These systems comprise several diverse components such as hardware, software, data structures and protocols while working towards a unified goal. Intersubjectivity then becomes the connective tissue between these diverse, pluralistic systems, helping them achieve a common purpose. 

Intersubjectivity recognizes that a shared understanding is formed via discourse and discussion rather than solely from objective data. In decentralized systems, this means recognizing that participants bring diverse, subjective perspectives that must be validated and incorporated, rather than simply relying on token-based voting or majority rule.

By embracing intersubjectivity, we can bridge the gap between blockchain’s objective nature and the inherently subjective realms of governance, economics, and social dynamics.

Current decentralized governance models, based on token-based voting, prioritize the will of the majority. Decision-making becomes transactional rather than reflective of the community’s collective will, leading to disenfranchisement and disengagement among participants. Intersubjective consensus, however, allows for contribution-based decision making, where a participant's time, work and contributions are more valuable than their token holdings. 

Moreover, intersubjective consensus can also help strengthen blockchain’s core principle of censorship-resistance.

Censorship resistance protects the free flow of information, ensuring no external authority can distort collective truths. While blockchains are inherently censorship resistant since the records are immutable, one way of censorship is through transaction ordering. Without censorship resistance, those in control of information flows could manipulate outcomes, undermining the intersubjective consensus. 

One crucial way that intersubjective consensus can ensure robust anti-censorship is low-cost is to align economic incentives across blockchains. When governance frameworks move away from token-ownership, we can create interoperable governance: governance mechanisms that are consistent across different blockchains. This interoperability can lead to an expansion of the user base of all networks, since participation is no longer tied to tokens. 

Intersubjectivity recognizes that human motivation is complex and multifaceted. Traditional economic models in blockchain focus solely on token ownership and are insufficient to create a fair compensation mechanism. 

Systems that prioritize token ownership create shallow participation and do not incentivize the full spectrum of contributions—such as creativity, governance, or community building. Intersubjective consensus can reward these contributions, creating fairer, sophisticated economic models that go beyond mere financial rewards. 

This is not just an economic innovation, it is a redefinition of value itself. Intersubjective consensus recognizes the full spectrum of human contribution and reflects the diverse needs of a system’s participants.

The vision outlined in this paper is a fundamental shift in how we approach the development of decentralized distributed systems. This paper is not just an intellectual exercise – it is a clarion call to action towards intersubjective consensus.

By embracing intersubjectivity, we can usher in an era of decentralized ecosystems that are not just transparent and secure, but also human-centric, and truly representative of the collective will of their participants.

The time to act is now. The movement for intersubjectivity in blockchain begins today.

While still in its infancy, deAI is a complex heterogeneous system that has many diverse parts such as GPU compute, large-language models, and inference. Unlike objective blockchain systems, where all transactions are recorded on-chain, many critical processes and interactions in deAI occur off-chain. Verifying and attributing these off-chain events on-chain within the broader network then becomes a complex task, often introducing challenges with data integrity, trust, and scalability. 

Enter intersubjective attribution, a novel mechanism where attribution of off-chain events is powered by causality graphs. 

Let’s first look at intersubjectivity: it posits that our experiences and understanding are fundamentally shaped by our interactions with others and the world around us. It's the shared understanding that allows us to communicate, empathize, and collaborate effectively.

In the context of digital systems, intersubjectivity offers a path to a more holistic form of trust. It suggests that true trust isn't just about verifying transactions or enforcing smart contracts - it's about creating shared understanding and mutual recognition among diverse entities in a network.

Meanwhile, causality graphs provide causal information for each event in a network, such as the number and identities of peers in a transaction dissemination graph, and causal dependencies with respect to other transaction invocation and commitment. This decentralized, causal information can help determine a fair order of events in a network.

The framework of intersubjectivity combined with the principles of causality helps create a robust technology that accurately and fairly attributes off-chain values on-chain. This technology is called intersubjective attribution, which is poised to bridge the gap between the dynamic interactions of different intelligences, human and AI.

DeAI applications require immense computational resources and data processing capabilities. Traditional blockchain systems where all events are recorded on-chain currently fail to provide the scalability and low latency that is crucial for the real-time and high-volume events that are characteristic of DeAI applications. 

This issue of scalability and real-time finality can be solved by intersubjective consensus, which enables more flexible and efficient event ordering. Hetu integrates intersubjective attribution into heterogeneous distributed systems, allowing DeAI to scale effectively while maintaining security.

1. Verifiable Logical Clock (VLC): At the heart of Hetu’s innovation is the verifiable logical clock. In a distributed system, event ordering is crucial but can become cumbersome if done via mechanisms that follow a global total order. An example is traditional consensus mechanisms. Hetu attaches a VLC to every event in a network for event ordering, creating a system that is more efficient. These VLCs are small and independently scalable, ensuring hyper-scalability and cost-efficiency in a network. 

2. Causality-Based Ordering: Unlike traditional consensus mechanisms that rely on total global ordering, Hetu uses partial ordering via establishing causal relationships between events. This approach is more flexible and efficient, especially for applications that can operate asynchronously or in parallel.

3. Off-chain Pre-confirmation: Hetu moves consensus off-chain and uses its causality hub to establish the order of events through the VLC system. This allows events to happen off-chain while still maintaining a verifiable order, significantly enhancing scalability and efficiency.

Hetu addresses key challenges in leveraging decentralized systems for DeAI and other applications that have a high volume of events or interactions, handle a large volume of data and offer real-time finality. Let’s explore the benefits Hetu provides for these applications. 

Hetu’s layered structural design separates global on-chain consensus from local off-chain consensus environments. This design provides highly elastic computation and verification capabilities at the local level, significantly expanding the potential for application across heterogeneous networks. In doing so, Hetu is a better choice for applications that need low latency and real-time finality, something blockchain networks are currently struggling to address.

Traditional blockchain networks often struggle with slow transaction confirmation times. Hetu solves this by using computational verification and event timestamping to confirm off-chain non-global consensus events. This approach allows for rapid finality and ordering without the need to wait for global on-chain confirmation. Moreover, this ordering is temporally comparability across various scenarios, ensuring consistency in heterogeneous systems.

Incentivizing participation in decentralized distributed networks is crucial. Hetu’s causality hub enables rapid verification and computation of proof data from different decentralized networks. This features allows non-transferable contributions to be converted into transferable credits or tokens at minimal cost, thereby supporting large-scale incentive systems.

By addressing some key challenges of decentralized distributed systems, Hetu paves the way for a new era of hyper-scalable decentralized applications that can operate at real-time speed.

A key differentiator for Hetu is its use of off-chain consensus and time-stamping for decentralized microservices. While blockchains put everything on-chain, Hetu takes some consensus off-chain, benefiting applications that have a high volume of transactions or events. This approach ensures low latency and hyper scalability, making Hetu perfect for applications such as deAI, decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) and decentralized science (DeSci), which require real-time finality and high throughput.

By selectively moving consensus off-chain, Hetu maintains the benefits of decentralized trust while overcoming the scalability limitations that have plagued many blockchain systems. This hybrid approach allows for interactions that are both nuanced and context-aware, bridging the gap between human subjectivity and digital objectivity.

Hetu’s ultimate goal lies beyond technological advancements. We embrace the philosophy of intersubjective trust-minimization to drive breakthroughs in the convergence of humans and AI. By enabling harmonious consensus and collaboration between different intelligences, we not only enhance the capabilities of DeAI systems but also ensure that they develop in a way that is aligned with human values and understanding.  

The development of truly complex systems that can capture the nuances of interactions between different intelligences requires us to delve into philosophy as much as into technological research. It necessitates a deep dive into the nature of trust, phenomenology, and shared understanding. 

Hetu combines innovative approaches like VLCs and causality graphs, allowing for interactions that are nuanced and context-aware. This enables digital interactions that maintain the subjectivity of humans while providing the objective trust, security and verifiability we expect from digital systems. This approach positions Hetu as a foundational layer for deAI.

We invite researchers, developers, and enthusiasts to join us and co-build on our research. Join our Telegram Builders Hub and follow us on Github to contribute to the protocol. Follow us on Twitter and Farcaster to stay up to date with the latest news.

As we prepare for an unforgettable week of innovation, learning, and networking, we are excited to present a curated list of insightful events designed to enhance your ETHCC experience. Explore the schedule, and we look forward to seeing you in Brussels!

This hackerhouse and hackathon is dedicated to developing decentralized artificial intelligence (dAI). Organized by cyber.fund and Epic Web3, dAGI is a three-day hackathon where you can build decentralized AI and win great prizes. 

Date: July 5-7, 2024

Location: Silversquare Bailli, Bruxelles

RSVP: https://lu.ma/26g4937r

Hosted by KryptoPlanet, this event promises a star-studded list of speakers including Alexander Hicks of the Ethereum Foundation, Illia Polosukhin of NEAR Protocol, and Hoansoo Lee of Exabits. The Summit is co-hosted with NEAR Protocol and sponsors include Nethermind, Olas, Livepeer, Gensyn, Exabits, Akash Network.

Date: July 6, 2024

Time: 10:30 AM - 5:30 PM

Location: Art & History Museum, Bruxelles

RSVP: https://lu.ma/58pgy07q

The inaugural De:PIN conference, this event is set to be at the forefront of all advancements in decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN). Speakers include Alessandro De Carli from Acurast, Michael Zajko, and Jakob Stammler of Powerledger. 

Date: July 7, 2024

Time: 12:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: Etterbeek, Bruxelles

RSVP: https://lu.ma/p6lwmu15

This event is for all decentralized science (DeSci) enthusiasts where you can explore how blockchain can revolutionize scientific progress through transparency and openness. Attendees will be able to meet various DeSci DAOs including VitaDAO, AthenaDAO, and CryoDAO.

Date: July 7, 2024

Time: 4:30 PM - 7:30 PM

Location: WeWork  - Espace du bureau et coworking, Bruxelles

RSVP: https://lu.ma/ha5iwigb

This day-long conference promises a range of keynotes and panels on insightful topics including modular blockchains and infrastructure interoperability challenges. Co-hosted by SendingNetwork, SocialScan, Aethir, Network3, and GM Network, this event will also give attendees a chance to network with leaders from these protocols.

Date: July 7, 2024

Time: 2:30 PM - 8:30 PM

Location: Mix, Watermael-Boitsfort, Bruxelles

RSVP: https://lu.ma/f3v2tlyz

The Open AGI Summit promises insightful discussions exploring the intersection of two leading technologies, AI and blockchain. Hosted by industry leaders including Polygon, EigenLayer, and Sentient, the event will also feature presentations from Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. 

Date: July 7, 2024

Time: 12:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: Bruxelles, Bruxelles

RSVP: https://lu.ma/lm3dcn3v

This event is your exclusive invitation to dive into the cutting-edge world of decentralized AI and intersubjectivity. Hosted by Hetu Protocol and ETHStorage, it will feature talks from both the projects, followed by a dynamic panel discussion on the transformative potential of decentralized AI and how intersubjectivity can revolutionize our digital interactions. Expect thought-provoking debates, visionary insights, and a glimpse into the future of technology. 

Date: July 8, 2024

Time: 5:00 PM - 10:30 PM

Location: Silversquare Bailli, Bruxelles

RSVP: https://lu.ma/jh1aoldl

The De:PIN Day at ETHCC is a one-day conference diving into the latest topics and research in DePIN and decentralized compute including multi-party computation, decentralized RPC, capacity rewards and proof systems. This will be the fourth edition of De:PIN Day, after successful events at ETHDenver, Berlin Blockchain Week, and Consensus this year. 

Date: July 10, 2024

Time: 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Location: Radisson Collection Hotel, Grand Place Brussels

RSVP: https://lu.ma/depin-brussels

This event, hosted by 0G, features discussions on key topics including how AI affects the current web3 landscape, new narratives and trends for AI, and investing in AI X Blockchain projects. 

Date: July 11, 2024

Time: 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Location: Silversquare Bailli, Bruxelles

RSVP: https://lu.ma/0G-EthCC

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Technology and philosophy do not seem to have much in common. One talks about machines and code, while the other delves into the essence of human thought and existence. How can machines influence our thinking? How can code answer the existential questions of human life? Historically, technology has developed independently of larger philosophical inquiries – until Satoshi Nakamoto dropped the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008. 

With its proposition of peer-to-peer transfers of electronic cash, the paper created a movement that reimagined how humans interacted with money. The movement did not stop at that. It led to the creation of an industry, web3, that has enshrined privacy, digital sovereignty, permissionless innovation, and user ownership into code. It ensures that these concepts are not luxuries but fundamental rights of the users. Social experiments with pop-up cities such as Zuzalu exemplify this. 

This intersection of blockchain and philosophy has guided us at Advaita Labs since our inception. We have been particularly focused on the philosophy of intersubjectivity – popularized recently by EigenLayer’s latest whitepaper – and its applications in distributed systems since our beginning, through our work on causality graphs. This work has led to the creation of the Hetu Protocol.

The Hetu protocol is based on the foundations of intersubjectivity and verifiable causality, a combination of which allows us to create an attribution layer enabling trust-minimized diverse incentive mechanisms for future microservices. 

In this blog, we will explore one of the founding pillars of Hetu, intersubjectivity, and how it can help create diverse economic incentives in distributed systems. We will then explore how intersubjectivity helps minimize trust in heterogeneous distributed systems, and finally look at some drawbacks in current distributed systems that make intersubjective consensus mechanisms necessary. 

“I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest." – Edmund Husserl

Blockchain technology is based on the idea of objectivity. If any data is stored on-chain, it is immutable, attributable, verifiable, and hence becomes a truth that cannot be changed. Much like the scientific fact of gravity. This objectivity ensures transparency and trust.

Subjectivity, on the other hand, is a version of reality that is mediated by the experiences of a single entity. For example, one may think that ETH will be more valuable in the long run when compared with BTC. This assumption is based on personal beliefs and is therefore, a subjective truth.  

Now, let’s understand intersubjectivity. A term first coined by the Austrian-German philosopher Edmund Husserl, it refers to a shared understanding between entities developed through their interactions with each other. Husserl posited that any experience of the self is always mediated through many factors – the body, historical life situations, relations with the other constituents of the world. Intersubjectivity thus forms a mutual understanding essential for human experience, extending beyond Descarters’ “I think, therefore, I am” to “I exist in relation to others and all my experiences are based on a shared understanding with the world”.  

Money is a prime example of an intersubjective agreement. Society collectively agrees to attribute value to coins, paper currencies or digital entries in banks and calls it money. The function of money is a social construct and is based on the fact that people trust it. 

The philosopher Jurgen Habermas highlighted the role of intersubjectivity in communication, arguing that any social norms are established through discourse and discussion. This process of communicative action is inherently intersubjective, as it relies on the participants' ability to recognize and validate each other's perspectives. 

Many Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, also reflect intersubjectivity. The Buddhist concept of dependent origination believes that all phenomena arise in dependence upon a multitude of causes and conditions. Take for example a person named Jane. Now, there is no singular self of Jane. It is not her body, her mind, her relationships, her thoughts, or her internal organs alone that can make up Jane. It is all these diverse elements and many more that harmoniously come together to form Jane. Buddhism then emphasizes the interconnectedness of all beings and challenges the notion of an independent, permanent self.

Now that we understand intersubjectivity, let us look at how this philosophy can help create fairer incentive mechanisms for users of decentralized systems. 

“The first law of tokenomics: don’t get your advice from people who use the word tokenomics” – Vitalik Buterin

Current consensus mechanisms work on establishing data ownership through tokens. For example, Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism rewards miners, in the form of BTC tokens and transaction fees, for being the first one to solve a complex cryptographic problem. The incentive structure focuses on the ownership of the infrastructure required for computation and the rewards for validation transactions. The rewards of the miners are directly proportional to the might and computational power of their mining infrastructure. It creates a static and linear economic model.

However, the real economy requires diverse incentive models to cater to the needs and motivations of a diverse, pluralistic user group. In this real economy, we do not need to address data ownership but the right to use that data. This is where intersubjective consensus mechanisms can help. 

By shifting the focus on data usage, intersubjective consensus mechanisms reward diverse contributions, fostering an interactive economy. Let’s illustrate this through a decentralized AI platform where all users contribute in diverse ways. While one user provides a high-quality dataset to train the AI model, the other contributes by providing processing power to run simulators. Even if users are performing the same activity, say contributing data sets to train the AI, they can be contributed based on the quality of the data, as well as the frequency and accuracy of their contributions. In this system, payment methods will also become more diverse, say tokens for data quality and staking rewards for maintaining algorithm integrity. Intersubjective consensus allows for focus to be on supporting services and the interactions between them, rather than solely around ownership. 

Diverse incentive mechanisms support more complex economic models, encouraging robust decentralized systems. By rewarding data usage, intersubjective consensus mechanisms promote pluralistic and diverse economic interactions.

The application of intersubjectivity extends beyond just incentive mechanisms in heterogeneous distributed systems, of which decentralized networks are a part. Let’s explore some more application of intersubjectivity in the following sections.

“A trust-minimized solution does not completely remove the need for trust but reduces it to the point where it’s almost negligible.” –  Vitalik Buterin

Heterogeneous distributed systems are systems that comprise diverse components such as hardware, software, data structures, and protocols while working towards a unified goal. Each component in these systems is designed to perform their specialized tasks optimally, increasing the efficiency of the whole system. This division in work also allows the system to be fault-resistant as even if one component fails, the rest of the system continues to function. 

A great example of a heterogeneous distributed system is interoperability between blockchains. All blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Polkadot have different protocols, consensus mechanisms, smart contract languages, and applications. However, interoperability solutions such as bridges, cross-chain protocols and oracles allow all these diverse components to communicate with each other and reach a common goal, for example, bridging from one blockchain to the other. 

In this context, intersubjectivity provides the connectivity and commonality that helps these diverse, pluralistic systems achieve a common goal. Distributed systems depend on participants for inputs, relying on the shared understanding and mutual comprehension between these participants. Here are some ways that users in a distributed system participate in intersubjectivity:

• Governance Models: Decentralized governance models, such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) rely on intersubjectivity for their functioning and organizational decision-making. DAO participants vote on the rules of the organization and future developments through voting mechanisms that rely on intersubjective agreements. 

• Decentralized Identity and Reputation: In truly distributed and decentralized systems, identity management and reputation systems rely on intersubjective validation rather than depending on centralized authorities. 

• Intersubjective Forking: In the latest application of intersubjectivity, EigenLayer’s proposal for intersubjective forking allows for a blockchain to be forked based on intersubjective agreements when on-chain data cannot determine the cause of malicious behaviour in a blockchain. 

Intersubjectivity fosters plurality in distributed systems, not just in terms of the system components but also in terms of the system’s culture. Vitalik Buterin recently highlighted this in his post, where he explored how a blockchain’s culture can be as powerful as economic incentives in attracting users. 

“Culture…affects what kinds of actions people are motivated to do, and what kinds of actions people can do. It affects what is considered legitimate - both in protocol design, and at the ecosystem and application layer.”

By bringing us closer to embracing pluralism, intersubjectivity can also help create a harmonious relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI). In a world that is fast-embracing AI in distributed heterogeneous systems, intersubjectivity acknowledges the differences between the two intelligences while also recognizing the similarities. Both forms of intelligence possess the ability to learn through observation and experience, and to process that learning to derive conclusions. The entire process of learning to conclusions is causal and interactive. Recognizing these commonalities allows us to build a foundation for mutual understanding and respect. 

The important point to note is that intelligence, whether human or artificial, relies on interaction and causality. And causality is indifferent to the form of intelligence, focusing solely on the flow of observations made, experiences and interactions had and influence created. Hetu, with its emphasis on causality, aims to be at the forefront of building a better relationship between different intelligences. Just as Ethereum bridges digital and real-world objects, Hetu connects different data structures and intelligences, both human and machine. Through Hetu, we aim to build an attribution layer that connects diverse elements of heterogeneous systems into a cohesive, harmonized energy state.

We now understand intersubjectivity from its philosophical roots as well as how it applies to distributed systems. Now let’s turn our attention to why we need intersubjectivity in distributed systems. 

Distributed systems today face challenges such as oracle discrepancies, transaction ordering issues, and byzantine faults. Intersubjective consensus mechanisms, which emphasize shared understanding and plurality, offer a robust approach to these problems.

1. Oracle Discrepancies

   Oracles are data providers that supply external, off-chain data such as asset prices, weather information, government IDs to a blockchain. Since oracles rely on bringing off-chain data on-chain, it can lead to inconsistencies, biases, and errors. Here, objectivity fails to work since for most of these types of data, there is no simple way (or in some cases it may be totally impossible) to verify their correctness by looking at the data alone. Intersubjective consensus mechanisms can address this problem by using data from multiple independent oracles, ensuring no single oracle unduly influences the system. To reach a single, trusted data point from multiple oracles, these consensus mechanisms can determine their own rules and leverage the data, say by using a weighted average or a median of all oracle data. 

   Hetu offers a way to generate verifiable proofs for this type of intersubjective consensus. The Hetu causality graph tracks the oracles that participated in the intersubjective consensus process, the source from which they obtained the data, and the way the final consensus result was combined. Any third party can independently verify the final data based on the number of oracles, their trustworthiness, and their source of data (and their causal precedences).

2. Transaction Ordering

   Transaction ordering is crucial in blockchains, with any discrepancies in the correct order of transactions changing the outcome and the subsequent state of the blockchain. One example of the manipulation of transaction ordering is front-running attacks, where attackers exploit transaction order for profit. This undermines the fairness and trust in a blockchain. 

   Unlike properties such as unforgeability and anti-double spending, fair ordering of transactions is hard to determine objectively. Intersubjective solutions like Hetu’s verifiable causality graphs provide mechanisms and semantics to reason about fair ordering of transactions, thereby enhancing trust. Instead of using unreliable sources such as physical time of transaction generation, Hetu provides causal information for each transaction, such as the number and identities of peers in the transaction dissemination graph, causal dependencies with respect to other transaction invocation and commitment. Intersubjective consensus policies can define a fair order of transactions using these reliable, verifiable, and decentralized causal information.

3. Byzantine Faults

   Byzantine faults refer to arbitrary behaviors by malicious participants that do not exactly follow the specified distributed protocols. A major type of Byzantine fault is equivocation, in which an adversary presents different views or information to different parties of the network. Now, this creates the issue that the distributed system cannot reach a consensus on whether to completely lock out the faulty server or to still keep taking information from it. A fundamental issue here is that in many cases, it is impossible to correctly identify that a node is adversary and actively attempting to equivocate, or this divergence in views was caused by other malicious nodes. In such a case, intersubjective consensus can ensure that distributed systems are resilient in the face of byzantine faults.

   The Hetu intersubjective consensus mechanism facilitates distributed systems to achieve consensus even if some participants in the system are behaving maliciously. Every event and information disseminated in the Hetu network is tagged with verifiable causality information. When presented with diverging views, honest participants can correctly identify sources of equivocation or malicious behaviors based on causal reasoning. Causality graphs also offer richer sets of semantics to define agreement rules, beyond the simple majority reasoning in traditional objective consensus. By encouraging diversity and redundancy in the system, intersubjective consensus mechanisms ensure that no node becomes a single point of failure and undermines the integrity of the network.

4. Consistency in Heterogeneous Computing Paradigms 

   The foundation of traditional blockchains is a single, global order of transactions that is achieved via objective consensus. Reaching global agreement on a total order, however, presents numerous issues. First, security guarantees of this global total order limits the overall system scalability. Second, the system becomes unavailable under poor or adversarial network conditions. This is a fundamental limitation due to the famous CAP theorem.

   The totally ordered ledger model fits well with financial applications. However, there exists a rich set of computing paradigms outside financial applications where the scalability and unavailability drawbacks of object consensus are detrimental. Some examples include AI, social, gaming, collaborative editing, and payment systems. Common themes across these application scenarios are high interactivity, high traffic volume, and demand for real-time responses. All are hard to achieve with current blockchain technology.

   Hetu’s intersubjectivity resonates well with these heterogeneous computing paradigms. Unlike financial applications, these systems typically do not require global total order of all events. Instead, they are resilient to weaker models of consistency, such as causal consistency and eventual consistency. Hetu’s causality graphs and logical clocks enable systems to have diverging distributed states. The divergence can be temporary and eventually becomes consistent, or it can be partial where only causally-related events are required to be consistent. Such more flexible consistency requirements allow systems to cache and access data locally, and continue to be operational even under long network partitions. Hetu’s intersubjectivity thus provides better performance, scalability, and availability to a diverse range of applications.

We now know that intersubjectivity is essential to generating consensus in decentralized systems. It is important to understand the diverse, pluralistic parts of an ecosystem, but to also ensure that there is unity in that diversity. Achieving harmony and integrity in the pluralistic parts of an ecosystem helps take a holistic approach to growth. And intersubjectivity facilitates that by minimizing the trust between heterogeneous distributed systems. It helps create a democratic framework for collaborative systems that reflect the diversity of their users. 

This is just the beginning. In the next part of our series, we will dive deeper into the future thought frameworks for intersubjective consensus and explore the other pillar of Hetu’s foundation, causality graphs. Stay tuned as we continue this journey towards a unified and harmonious web3.

If you've read till the end, congratulations! We hope we have helped you understand intersubjectivity in distributed heterogeneous systems. Follow us on Twitter and Farcaster for more relevant content from Hetu. Join our Telegram group to be a part of our growing community!