Shipyard, a key maintainer of LIBP2P – Peer-to-peer network stack supports Ethereum and numerous other networks – by September 30th, it will stop supporting GO and JavaScript implementations and cite resource constraints.
In a blog post, the team confirmed that they are “working on a stewardship transition to the community.”
LIBP2P is the backbone of Ethereum’s peer-to-peer networking layer, providing a suite of protocols used by consensus clients to discover peers, exchange messages, and propagate blocks and proofs across the network. The Ethereum client relies on LIBP2P’s Gossipsub Pub/Sub Protocol to quickly broadcast new blocks and Validator votes.
According to MIT professor and MIT who dropped in an API-compatible alternative to Gossipsub called Optimump2p (Mump2p), and the optimal co-founder Muriel Médard, who developed an API-compatible alternative. The current situation is “contrary to good engineering practices.”
“The problem is that if you make something that doesn’t require hardwiring to handle, it creates vulnerability and dependency,” Medard told Blockworks.
Loading Tweets…
The TEA protocol presents one possible answer to funding such a challenge within the open source software community. TEA maps open source dependencies, ranks projects critically, ranks token token rewards and security bounties as maintainers, and routes the scope to ensure long-term and sustainable support, according to Max Howell, co-founder of TEA, creator of HomeBrew.
Ecosystems that rely on LIBP2P are mobilized around software migration, but in the short term there is a risk of triaging bugs and security issues amid loss of institutional knowledge at shipyards.
“Incentives aren’t really there because open source maintainers are concerned about security,” Howell told BlockWorks, saying today that open source software is more than a “public good” but rather “basic infrastructure.”
Loading Tweets…
Tea co-founder Timothy Lewis said that Libp2p is “in protocol ranking graphs, what we believe is in the layer of active protocols and standards that support ecosystems like Ethereum.”
Based on the data from the package manager, TEA tracks the relative importance of code through a system called TEA rank, and added Lewis, it is currently “leaning towards graphs of these protocols.”
Alternative brewing
An alternative to Optimum, Mump2p provides a Pub-Sub interface like Libp2p, while removing Gossipsub redundancy and latency using Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC).
Medard said the gossip sub “slows under stress,” and that propagation bottleneck is now an important limiter of Ethereum scaling. In contrast, Mump2p can send “equations” rather than repeating messages, which is still under testing, but with a much lower latency.
For now, the future of Libp2p is hanging out by a new wave of community maintainers, including those within Crypto. Whether or not a tea-like protocol can be reached Durable funds For attractive maintenance, I still don’t know.
“Our mainnet is right there,” Lewis said. “This is a way to ensure that the central protocols of Web3 are not left behind, but they are supported sustainably in the long run.”
