Hyperspace: The new L1 that a16z's founders focused on redefining the future of supercomputing

Words: Hyperspace

Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Editor’s note: This is a new type of L1 that hasn’t received much attention, but has been noticed by many industry insiders, including Marc Andreessen, founding partner of a16z, who wrote from the project’s initial self-statement about why they chose to start building a new blockchain in 2023 and their long-term vision for the future.

I am a time traveler from the year 2025. It’s a moment when the whole world knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and blockchain is used by hundreds of millions of people every day. These two statements are closely related, and our present reality stems from the following story that you are about to read.

On January 24, 2023, a group of people collectively known as Gutenberg announced the launch of Hyperspace, a new type of supercomputer powered by a fully browser-based blockchain. In hindsight, it has become one of the most important products in computing history since the introduction of the Macintosh on January 24, 1984. It sounds ridiculous when you read this phrase in 2023, but not now. Our world is very different from yours - it was created by willpower by a group of people who should not have done these things.

Why build a new blockchain in 2023?

To give you an idea of how outrageous Hyperspace’s invention is, consider that by the beginning of 2023, dozens of extremely well-funded blockchains already exist. The community at the time thought that what needed to be invented had already been invented, which was the result of people not understanding the utility of blockchain. The problem is that the community is building blockchain as an extension of the research project, and these frictions are ignored, and then most others are unfortunately swept up in extracting all the value they can from these systems.

We learned how to build a blockchain from Satoshi Nakamoto, but don’t know why he created it. **

In this world, Satoshi’s information has been lost. It’s a message about simplicity, providing equal opportunities for all at the beginning, and sharing the benefits of the crypto economy across the network. It’s a message of making sacrifices for the broader good, the sacrifice of choosing to live an ordinary life, either to get credit for your invention, or to deliberately not mine like you could have done – again to choose the interests of the network. Recall that in 2009, a college student could download BTC client and earn 50 BTC just as a full network participant. These BTC were almost worthless at the time, but if the network took off, it provided equal opportunities for all.

The Blockchain Era Sweeping the World

In 2022, blockchain has fully entered the franchise era, just as a local businessman decided to run a McDonald’s franchise. It’s an investment: deep financial and technical resources to become a full validator. Block production is actively transferred to centralized entities, which is a deliberate design decision, such as ETH Workshop, where at one point more than 80% of production was done by a single corporate entity. There are only a few thousand full validators, mostly located in specific AWS data centers in Virginia and Germany. Many other projects masquerade as blockchains and are actually only somewhat decentralized than traditional enterprise databases. A liquid collateralized spin-off entity with about 100 members theoretically held the governance of many of the major proof-of-stake blockchains at the time. By simply appearing on a list of obscure bureaucrats in a particular country, transactions can be censored and the user experience significantly worse. After 2022, the world has also begun to associate cryptocurrencies with greed rather than with utility.

In addition to speculators, ordinary people are excluded from the world of blockchain. **

While almost everyone in the world doesn’t have access to full network rewards (considering that only 6% of U.S. households can afford to become a full validator of the ETH in 2022), developers are being asked to learn complex programming languages while also figuring out how to connect all the pieces in the blockchain ecosystem at the time. This resulted in around 1,000 active blockchain developers, when there were more than 100 million software developers worldwide. Users are willing to sacrifice less because there are enough friction points. We didn’t build enough systems and applications for people in Manila, Casablanca, or even Phoenix, Arizona. This has led to a fundamental inequality, and it is unfair that a person with sufficient technical and financial resources becomes the main beneficiary of a powerful new blockchain world.

People saw the smart contract revolution of the 2010s, but they didn’t experience it firsthand. **

The ETH was the most amazing technology project of the 2010s, sparking a wave of creativity. However, even in 2022, the idea of building an Uber on ETH is still just a discussion. Why isn’t this actually happening?Why are proprietary database providers with high commission fees still being used even in the blockchain community?Blockchain’s massive disruption of the real world hasn’t materialized?Why isn’t there any other blockchain that brings real, everyday utility to anyone?Why is blockchain tied to bull and bear market sentiment and GDP not?

There is a need for a fresh start, to rethink everything from scratch. A team of amateurs who have nothing and are full of enthusiasm might ask ridiculous questions like:

• Well, what does a blockchain that is more decentralized than ETH look like?
• How can we get ordinary people to participate in the blockchain more broadly, and reintroduce the spirit of BTC and BitTorrent’s early participation?
• Can we provide validators, users, and developers with a fully browser-native entire blockchain experience?
• Why should people pay “franchise owners” for computations on other blockchain systems when they can simply use their own browsers?
• From Manila to Mumbai, what kind of blockchain system design can allow tens of millions of people to use it at the same time?

The opening page of the first draft of the Hyperspace paper: it introduces detailed P2P browser engineering innovations, a ZK-Proof and WebAssembly-based runtime called Nanochain, a super-decentralized parallel execution and parallel block production architecture called Interstellar, all of which make use of a massively decentralized state subprotocol called Groot. This article explains the mathematical and engineering underpinnings of why the design is safe, how it works and scales, and how fast it is. It then further explains how we simplify the end-to-end experience for users, developers, and validators at scale.

All zombie blockchains are fast and cheap. But our goal is to design the cheapest and fastest system for high concurrency. **

Designing Hyperspace: Our Reflections

When Hyperspace announced that it was being developed, the blockchain landscape looked like this:

This blockchain was the “microchip” of the entire new browser-based P2P supercomputer, which was built in later years and was the fastest L1 and most powerful design at the time it was announced. This is a combination of fundamentally new innovations based on industry observations of rapid learning/iteration, resulting in a zkVM design that executes in parallel across networks (beyond the robust server designs prevalent in other blockchains) that can also be verified in parallel. A series of Hyperspace’s breakthrough technologies at the time included:

Browser P2P Network: Enhance the browser to run the blockchain protocol without the user having to download anything

The browser web solution found by Gutenberg’s team was the most groundbreaking of this generation, ushering in a whole new era of networking that was essentially peer-to-peer.

As part of the first set of engineering challenges, the team developed a network library that enhanced comprehensive point-to-point connections between existing browsers: from discovering these nodes to forming stable connections to exchange data. Running a full blockchain node now no longer requires downloading and installing software on your computer. This makes the blockchain and decentralized services of the future fully browser-based in the near future and will open up a world of decentralized web applications. Imagine that the entire front-end of these applications runs on this P2P network, without the need for big tech cloud services. This provides users with better privacy protection, reduces latency in some cases, and ultimately lowers costs, while providing a permanent, highly available, permissionless network.

PS: If you liked Nostr in late 2022, you’ll also like Hyperspace networking protocol in 2023 because it offers similar benefits but now has full P2P.

Web zkVM: Build a fast and secure runtime based on ZK+WebAssembly in the browser that can generate proof of execution

Hyperspace leverages the new web zkVM in the user’s own browser to execute the smart contract and captures the execution proof trace in STARK. These STARKs (“actions”) are packaged into a single SNARK transaction and propagated through the network. This design enables massively parallel execution. This plays a key role in parallel validation due to which specific states are known. Overall, this design achieves 10ms-50ms pre-L1 determinism in the same area, provides a faster experience than so-called web2, and enables new web3 multiplayer use cases.

Here’s a link to a live demo of Hyperspace web zkVM - click here to try it out!

This site embeds a zero-knowledge runtime. To see how fast it is, try our simulation limits. When you press the play button, send it as many actions as you can for the next ten seconds by pressing any key/any mouse click or touch. Each time an action is triggered, the runtime executes a piece of WebAssembly (WASM) code that simulates getting/modifying state, and then generates a proof of its execution (making the block green). All of these proofs are then combined into a single proof, which constitutes a transaction in the Hyperspace system.

If you think that’s fast enough, imagine it’s the foundation of the user experience for social, gaming, financial, and marketplace apps.

3. Parallel Validation: Modular construction and verification using a multi-lane highway approach, which is very practical for global use

• Narwhal-inspired DAG and enhanced Hotstuff

A group of decentralized nodes that utilize DAG and weighting algorithms efficiently package transactions into chunks that are then sent to specific validator shards.

• Conflict-free shard consensus

These shards can also receive transactions directly, further build blocks, and execute distributed consensus, validating multiple microblocks in parallel, without conflict.

• Breakthrough design of sharded state

Hyperspace is designed from the ground up with a sharded state strategy, which prevents state bloat that has affected all monolithic L1 builds to date. ETH Workshop’s own technical project leader used to call it a “death spiral” because the state grew by 1 gigabyte per day. Hyperspace aims to solve this problem from the start.

• Optimized for cross-program calls

Overall, the system is designed with the worst-case scenario in mind: maximum cross-program calls. This requires reimagining the entire verification and execution layer to achieve true platform scalability by completely removing execution bottlenecks from validators, enabling parallel validation.

• Built-in horizontal expansion design

The system design makes it possible to continuously increase validator shards as the system grows, as it does not require a single block producer node to have high system requirements. This has always been the foundation of the Gutenberg team’s philosophy: to enable ordinary people to become all-network participants using a simple laptop and a browser.

Hyperspace incorporates everything from identity to oracle and even re-staking into the underlying protocol, enabling premium UX and DX

There’s one thing in common between Apple’s approach to its products and Vitalik’s advice on how to build a new blockchain: an integrated experience.

• Hyperspace incorporates oracles into the core protocol, and existing validators can start providing oracle services to the network using browser-based client software. By leveraging a re-staking mechanism incorporated into the underlying protocol, it improves security and expands the range of services such as cross-chain primitives, automation, time management, and Web2 data. This build also greatly simplifies the direct integration of dApps built on ETH, Solana, Polkadot, and Near with Hyperspace. From a developer’s perspective, this sanctified oracle provides low-level primitives that simplify the processing of off-chain data compared to the oracles that existed at the time.
• Hyperspace provides an integrated identity and smart wallet sub-protocol, introducing a new way to manage independent identities within the Hyperspace ecosystem. These are known as session sub-wallets, and they are cryptographically derived from the user’s main wallet, abstracting them to the multiple identities of their specific application. This design is inspired by the traditional web user experience, giving users complete control over the apps they authorize, as well as spending limits. Overall, this zero-install approach simplifies the adoption process for beginners while providing practical security options for advanced users. This sub-protocol also specifies a token/NFT standard that makes it easier for smart contract developers to integrate while enabling composability. This unlocks new design space for non-confirmed transactions that are perfectly suited to multiplayer scenarios.

**Designed for developers. "A line of code that is the fastest to write, never breaks, and never needs maintenance is the one you never need to write. - Steve Jobs, 1997 keynote. **

Hyperspace’s use of Type as the primary smart contract development language, combined with a software development kit (SDK), enables millions of amateur web developers to quickly adapt to smart contracts. The protocol also sanctifies multiple sub-protocols and decentralized services, providing developers with an integrated experience that simplifies the building of complex applications.

Smart contract wallets are designed to provide context-based access, which is beneficial for developers as it provides security to users, builds trust, and promotes greater usage. Overall, Hyperspace is designed to provide the fastest blockchain experience possible, where pre-L1 determinism is comparable to Google search speed in the same region.

Just as Uber disrupted the taxi license business, Hyperspace disrupted the full node validator business - democratizing it

Hyperspace’s cryptoeconomics is driven by a few fundamental ideas, including:

• Even college students who use laptops should be able to earn significant rewards by simply using their browsers and fully participating in this new network.
• Deflationary model, a deflationary model that increases the value of the underlying token by re-staking it, thereby increasing the security of the network.
• Keep the blockchain independent from any governance mechanisms imposed by external liquidity staking derivatives. If all other PoS blockchains are censored for any reason, at least Hyperspace should remain viable.
• Maximize the decentralization of block production among the average person, as opposed to corporate entities that are likely to censor and degrade the permissionless user experience.

What People Went Through: The Supercomputer Era

The term “supercomputer” used to refer to a group of extremely powerful computers connected together in the same building. Hyperspace takes this concept to the point where hundreds of millions of people use it only through a browser on their laptop, without any installation. This entirely P2P-based “computer” builds on three inevitable trends of the 2020s:

• Laptops and other personal computing devices have become incredibly powerful and cheaper at the same time. This makes running computing in the data center obsolete.
• Bandwidth has become faster and cheaper, and at the same time, new capabilities have been unlocked by improving the browser’s P2P network.
• The era of zero-knowledge proofs and WebAssembly makes it possible to run on computers at near-native speeds even within the browser without any installation.
• Hyperspace is a way for the average person to experience the efficient networking capabilities formed by the direct connection of browser nodes, and to be able to perform a variety of functions that are typically done using proprietary APIs and cloud providers. The “Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, and even ChatGPT” of our time increasingly and inevitably run on such a P2P network maintained by the average web user, rather than being subject to a particular company and its rules. Software functionality has been commoditized on a large scale, and this is the age of smart contracts.

We imagine a world like this: it’s all about cryptocurrency. **

With Hyperspace, you now don’t need to pay high rates to third-party closed databases to just execute business logic. The code is open, active, and usable. You can trade with others efficiently directly from your own computer. You can easily access millions of smart contracts, or quickly assemble your own. Your data isn’t locked; you own and control it. You can also choose to participate in the network and provide it with computer resources to improve network health and earn rewards. Think BitTorrent.

It’s a browser-driven, peer-to-peer computing world with no downloads. The Hyperspace blockchain is like a microchip, operating invisibly – as a user, you experience the power of the entire network.

**We’re improving the basic web experience. **

Endgame: A fully peer-to-peer native browser

“The network is the platform” – Mark Anderson

While major browser vendors continue to make the underlying hardware and software incredibly powerful, they are not fully aligned with the peer-to-peer computing paradigm. This required the Gutenberg team to come up with several innovations related to the browser web that involved a number of trade-offs. Ultimately, in order to provide users with the highest quality and closest to native Web3 experience, the ultimate goal has become building a hyperbrowser.

As a dedicated browser built on Chromium, it will bring the zk proof runtime close to native performance, and even enable home node operators to earn more by providing GPU and storage access directly. The browser will transcend the limitations of the Chromium web stack and become a native peer-to-peer browser and make authentication with a solidified identity layer more convenient for end users. Imagine being able to type someone’s identity address directly into the browser and be able to view their profile, send tokens, NFTs, etc.

Since the runtime is also native to the browser, the loading speed of decentralized web applications will also be greatly improved. This is achieved by telling the server where the dApp is stored and that the requester is using Hyperbrowser. The server then sends a smaller application that contains only smart contracts, CSS, HTML, and Java – no additional runtime. This will save bandwidth by drastically reducing the size required to load applications and provide a faster experience while improving decentralization. The world of tens of millions of smart contracts that have become native web objects is fundamentally beneficial to consumers.

Overall, Hyperspace intends to raise the bar as a web browser in the 2020s. The client-server browsers of the 2010s were great, but now it’s time to roll out powerful peer-to-peer software across devices.

Build with AI, deploy on Hyperspace

A brief introduction to how the software world works today:

It’s 2025, and the creation of software is done by generations of AI products that follow ChatGPT and similar models, and the deployment and use of software takes place on accelerated P2P “supercomputers” like Hyperspace. Your AI agent tailors an end-to-end personalized software experience for you based on your history and basic prompts, using Hyperspace as the deployment layer.

Here’s an example of a user renting out a spare room:

In order to simply rent a room to a traveler, you don’t have to go to a website, click on many buttons, manually choose a price, and pay expensive and arbitrary commission fees, all while also locking your data! Use data provided by you – all running entirely on a fully peer-to-peer network of thousands of browser-based nodes stitched together by Hyperspace using cryptoeconomic incentives.

Even these millions of smart contracts weren’t built by blockchain rocket scientists in the early 2020s, but were created by AI models using simple prompts from ordinary web users or thousands of Type developers. Now, by saying a word, you can rent out your room at the best price and pay almost no commission fees because smart contracts automatically compete for you! We go from the automatic competition of advertisers in Google search results to the automatic competition of smart contracts on Hyperspace to provide you with the best software utility.

Software has been commoditized like electricity. Other use cases include:

• P2P Discord and other messaging apps.
• P2P Netflix, Youtube, and other file-sharing systems.
• P2P Notion and other note-taking systems.
• The P2P metaverse, further realized through technologies such as WebGPU and WebXR. In MMORPG games, everyone moves around a connected app map in the 3D world.
• P2P games: one player hosts, other players can join directly.
• P2P AI: Each user uses only their local user data to co-train the model.

Now, the idea of a single company owning your data can seem like a distant memory. We have very powerful laptops, and with the fast and cheap bandwidth that is now available, they are seamlessly connected to each other, using Hyperspace supercomputers. This is our new world, and it’s exciting that we’re still in the early stages of recognizing the full power of such a network.