Overview

FastSet is a distributed protocol for parallel claim settlement. It is inspired by blockchains, but is built to overcome their performance and scalability challenges. It does not require validator communication or consensus rounds, neither does it enforce a global total order for claim processing.

While it offers more flexibility, it provides all the desirable guarantees for blockchains—security, scalability, and decentralization.

Up to speed with terminology

Before moving on, let’s clarify some terminology we have used above.

• Claim: This can be a payment, a vote, an auction bid, an AI model inference, or any similar statement which can be verifiable. Claims are sent by the clients (i.e., users/accounts) to the validators and are accompanied by proofs.

• Proof: This can be a signature, a cryptographic/zero-knowledge proof, a mathematical proof, a formal semantics derivation, etc.

• Validators: These are the nodes in the network and are responsible for validating signatures, settling claims, and replicating the global state.

• Verifiers: These are account holders, like any other application/user, responsible for checking more involved proofs, meaning other types of proof than signatures.

Not just another blockchain

Although it bears many similarities with a blockchain, FastSet is not one. It’s a Web3 infrastructure on which the next wave of blockchains and verifiable computing applications can be built.

Blockchains resemble a public decentralized ledger. Anybody on the network can submit a transaction, which once accepted by a selected subset of nodes, is added to the chain and propagated to the other nodes, so they can append it to their local copy of the chain.

Transactions (colored stripes) are submitted to the network, blue first and yellow last. Once accepted by the consensus/settlement algorithm (vortex), they become blocks settled on the chain (rectangles at the top, with genesis block depicted as light purple) and are propagated to all the nodes in the network. The purple boxes represent the nodes of the network and the colorful stacks to their right denote the order in which transactions are appended to their local copy of the blockchain, with the one on the bottom representing the first transaction.

FastSet, instead, does not enforce a global order on transactions, nor does it require its nodes to communicate with each other to propagate the global state change.

FastSet validators use and maintain their own local state. As such, each claim can be verified, validated, and settled optimally: independently and in parallel with any other claim. Since validators do not communicate with each other, there is no consensus in the strict sense of the word as used in blockchains. Specifically, FastSet is not strongly consistent, but it is strongly eventually consistent, due to the requirement on weak independence of claims and commutativity of claim settlement.

Transactions (colored stripes) are processed in the order they are received by the validators. The purple boxes represent the nodes of the network and the colorful stacks to their right denote the order in which transactions are appended to their local copy of the blockchain, with the one on the bottom representing the first transaction.

FastSet enables new kinds of decentralized applications, such as payments, verifiable computation, digital identity, or voting, through an infrastructure which:

• Achieves high throughput and scalability with massively parallel settlement.

• Ensures decentralization through validators which are independent, and deterministic.

• Avoids global consensus overhead while still ensuring safety and correctness.

Whether you're building in Web3, Web2.5, or working with oracles, appchains, or AI agents, FastSet gives you a programmable, verifiable foundation for decentralized logic and settlement.

What’s next?

• Core concepts: Familiarize yourself with key concepts in FastSet such as weak independence and claims.

• FastSet protocol: Learn what consensus is and how settlement works in Fastset.

If you’re ready to explore deeper, you can head on to the next section, where we’ll break down the core concepts of the FastSet protocol.