whitepaper-colibri-client
  • Introduction
    • Motivation
    • Challenges of Current Blockchain Access
  • The Future of Stateless Clients
  • Technical Concept
    • Stateless Verification and Efficient Data Retrieval
      • Execution Layer Data Retrieval and Verification
      • Consensus Verification
      • Optimization Techniques for Efficient Verification
    • Multi-Chain Interaction
  • Practical Observations
    • Stateless Clients in Practice
      • Web and Mobile Applications
      • Internet of Things (IoT)
      • AI Agents and Asset Management
  • Eliminating Security Risks: Attack Scenarios and Stateless Client Solutions
    • Security Risks of Trusted RPC Endpoints
    • Trustless Stateless Clients as a Security Solution
    • Real-World Attack Scenarios and Stateless Client Solutions
  • Summary
    • Summary and Outlook
    • References
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  • Decentralization as a Trustless Alternative
  • The Problem of Trust in Centralized Systems
  • The Need for Efficient Blockchain Access
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  1. Introduction

Motivation

Corpus Core Colibri Client (C4) – A Stateless and Trustless Ultra-Light Client for Ethereum and (any) other blockchain

Decentralization as a Trustless Alternative

Blockchain technology has become a foundational pillar for distributed systems, enabling secure, trustless interactions without relying on centralized intermediaries. While initially associated with cryptocurrencies, its applications extend across financial services, supply chain management, identity verification, gaming, art, digitized assets, governance and voting, internet-of-things, and many more, where verifiable data integrity and fault tolerance are critical.

The Problem of Trust in Centralized Systems

Most digital infrastructures today rely on centralized architectures, where service providers maintain complete control over data and operations. While centralized systems offer advantages such as convenience, ease of use, fast transaction processing, simplified governance, and compliance with regulatory frameworks, they introduce systemic vulnerabilities:

  • Centralized Control: Operators possess unilateral authority over data and services, allowing for censorship, access revocation, and opaque policy changes.

  • Single Points of Failure: Centralized infrastructures create attack surfaces prone to security breaches, outages, and manipulation.

  • Limited Transparency: Users depend on providers to act in good faith, often without cryptographic guarantees ensuring the correctness or integrity of stored and transmitted data.

  • Encryption Limitations: While encryption is widely employed to secure data in transit, centralized systems do not inherently guarantee the integrity or verifiability of the data source itself.

The Need for Efficient Blockchain Access

Blockchains provide robust security guarantees, resistance to censorship and manipulation, and trustless operation. However, direct and efficient access remains a challenge. In principle, users of decentralized applications can run their own full nodes to interact with the decentralized ecosystem. Often, this is impractical due to high storage, bandwidth, and computational requirements, making alternative access mechanisms necessary. Many decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contract platforms rely on centralized RPC infrastructure to interact with blockchain networks, reintroducing trust dependencies and potential points of failure.

To fully leverage blockchain’s decentralization, access mechanisms must be:

  1. Independent—Verification of blockchain state should be possible without reliance on third-party services.

  2. Efficient—Resource-constrained environments (e.g., mobile, IoT) require low-bandwidth, low-storage solutions.

  3. Trustless—All retrieved data should be cryptographically verifiable without intermediary validation.

The Corpus Core Colibri Client (C4) addresses these challenges by providing a stateless, trustless, and efficient blockchain verification framework. C4 eliminates dependency on RPC endpoints and enables secure, direct blockchain interaction, making it particularly suited for mobile, IoT, and other constrained environments.

NextChallenges of Current Blockchain Access

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