2026-11-05 –, Lotus Stage 3
What happens when censorship, Internet shutdowns, or infrastructure failures isolate parts of a permissionless network? Using real libp2p deployments including Zemzeme and Qaul, this talk shows how observability, regional nodes, DNS-based discovery, and rapid infrastructure recovery can keep P2P networks connected, and how to measure resilience in practice.
Permissionless networks are often evaluated under normal operating conditions, but their real resilience is revealed when connectivity is disrupted. This talk shares lessons from real libp2p deployments, including Qaul.net and Zemzeme’s operation during severe network restrictions, where global bootstrap infrastructure became unreachable and regional nodes, DNS-based discovery, node rotation, and autorecovery were used to restore connectivity. We will examine what these deployments revealed about geographic redundancy, discovery dependencies, recovery time, and operational resilience, and show how network observability can turn failures into actionable engineering decisions. The audience will leave with practical methods for measuring whether a P2P network can maintain or recover connectivity under censorship, outages, and infrastructure disruption.
Manu Sheel Gupta is building LeakDetectAI and is a Technical Lead and maintainer across libp2p, multiformats, and IPLD, working on P2P networking, secure communication channels, PQ clients interoperability, decentralized systems, and open Internet infrastructure. His work focuses on secure, resilient, and permissionless networks through open standards, security research, and open-source development. He is a volunteer and contributes to the Trillion Security Research (1TS) initiative at Ethereum.
I'm Strategy and Operations Lead for libp2p, the P2P networking stack underpinning IPFS, Filecoin, Ethereum, and Polkadot, and co-founder of Meshworks alongside Manu Sheel Gupta. My work spans ecosystem sustainability, grant-making, funding strategy, partnerships, and standards engagement for libp2p under the Open Impact Foundation. I represent libp2p at the IETF, where our team's work on verifiable telemetry for large-scale deployments was recently accepted at IETF 126 Vienna.