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libp2p
specs
Systems & Infrastructure2017–2024
libp2p / specs

specs

Technical specifications for the libp2p networking stack

8Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Technical specifications for the libp2p networking stack

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-05-10 00:26:52 UTC to 2024-01-16 14:40:02 UTC.

01232017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

10 sources
The problems you described are specific to implementations, not the protocol itself. I have read all of the QUIC specs in full (since I'm working on an implementation) and have seen nothing in any of them that mandates a centralised certificate infrastructure (caveat: I have not read the HTTP/3 spec, perhaps you could point out the relevant section if its in there). Of course, the most common use case requires this, but in that respect it's no different to HTTPS. IPFS uses QUIC as one of its supported transport protocols, and this works in the most common implementation, Kubo [1]. The spec for the QUIC transport used in IPFS [2] indicates the same certificate trust policy as for the TLS protocol [3]. The latter, in turn, relies on peer-to-peer authentication with automatically-generated self-signed certificates containing a libp2p-specifi
Read the rest
c additional extension. IPFS is particularly well suited to the use case of personal websites you've mentioned, as it's specifically designed to operate without any form of centralisation. [1] https://github.com/ipfs/kubo. [2] https://github.com/libp2p/specs/tree/master/quic [3] https://github.com/libp2p/specs/blob/master/tls/tls.md
In Avoiding HTTP/3 (for a while) as a pragmatic default
Hi HN, during December 2022, we are running a measurement campaign to investigate decentralized NAT hole punching success rates using the libp2p DCUtR protocol [0]. Ubiquitous peer-to-peer connectivity is still a big challenge. If successful, NAT Hole Punching can be a game-changer for decentralised applications and networks! For that we are searching for participants who would run a lean client on their machines that performs hole punches with other peers and then reports back the results to our server. We explained the measurement methodology in this video [1] and the linked repository above. Running such a client certainly has privacy implications which are documented here [2]. Most importantly, we record public IP addresses, successful NAT port mappings, and the login router page (to draw conclusions about which routers work better th
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an others). Optionally, you can also sign up here [3] and provide additional information about your personal network and receive a personal API key so that we can link your data to your information. Obviously, this has stronger privacy implications - but this is totally optional. The most frictionless way to participate is to head to the releases page [4] and download a client that suits your platform and needs. No sign-up required. [0] https://github.com/libp2p/specs/blob/master/relay/DCUtR.md [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyhZWlDbcyM [2] https://discuss.libp2p.io/t/call-for-participation-nat-hole-... [3] https://forms.gle/h1ABCpS87jYmg9a48 [4] https://github.com/dennis-tra/punchr/releases/tag/v0.9.0
In Call HN: Decentralized Nat Hole Punching Measurement Campaign
Hey there! I’m one of the first developers to work on IPFS, and was the maintainer of the project for around three years. I’ve since been pulled into working on Filecoin, which has definitely taken away from the time I can spend pushing IPFS forward. That said, the IPFS Project has a really solid team and OSS community still pushing the project forward, and there is an entire team working on just libp2p (the network stack used by IPFS and other projects like Livepeer, Ethereum 2.0, OpenBazaar, and more). There’s been a ton of progress made recently, and the network has grown significantly. We’ve gone from nearly 30k peers last year (this is hard to estimate accurately, but best guess) to around 400k peers on the network today — roughly 13x growth. This massive influx in usage has taken a lot of our attention up, things catching fire that
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we didn’t expect to catch fire, and other bugs popping up that need to be fixed now. All this detracts our attention from things like docs and website publishing, but we recognize it’s a really important area we need to make time for and step things up. For example, there’s an overhaul of ipfs-cluster docs: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster-website/issues/89#issue... We also put a lot of effort into our new docs website: https://docs.ipfs.io/ And we’ve been pushing a lot of specs for everything we build: https://github.com/libp2p/specs https://github.com/ipfs/specs https://github.com/filecoin-project/specs https://github.com/ipld/specs
In IPFS, Again
Hey Mark, pretty sure you're talking about floodsub, which is a naive implementation of pubsub of top of libp2p, not actually 'libp2p'. Libp2p is quite a bit more than a simple p2p pubsub library. In any case, floodsub is just one option you can use for pubsub on top of libp2p (one with a notably high level of reliability and minimal cross network latency for infrequent messaging). We also have a tree pruning gossiping implementation called gossipsub. Take a look at the spec: https://github.com/libp2p/specs/blob/master/pubsub/gossipsub...
In Libp2p – A modular network stack
There's a circuit switching relay protocol [1] in the works which will allow multi-hop connections. This is generally useful for situations where two nodes can't directly connect to each other, be it because of NAT, censorship, or simply because they don't have a transport protocol in common (e.g. js-ipfs in the browser). That means nodes can soon use the Websockets transport to connect to a domain-fronted node (this part already works), which then acts as a relay. [1] https://github.com/libp2p/specs/tree/master/relay
In Uncensorable Wikipedia on IPFS

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