2026-11-03 –, Jasmine Stage 4
Every block you see and every transaction you send travels through a peer-to-peer network that almost nobody thinks about, until it strains. This session introduces that layer in plain language: how nodes find each other, how data spreads, and where the hard problems are. It also previews four days at the P2P Networking Hub, and asks what you'd want to get out of joining.
Ethereum's peer-to-peer layer is the plumbing underneath everything else: the system that lets thousands of independent nodes find each other, move data around and the chain forward. It is also where some of the least-understood scaling, privacy and resilience problems live.
This talk is a tour of that layer for a general audience, with no prior knowledge assumed. We'll also preview the four themed days at the P2P Networking Hub: Foundations & Discovery, Scaling & Broadcast, Privacy & Censorship-Resistance, and Resilience & Open Problems.
The hub sessions will be run by EF Research, Gnosis VPN/HOPR, Optimum, Sigma Prime and ProbeLab, among others. Join the interactive stage talk to influence the hub program. Join the hub with questions; it will include talks, discussions, roundtables and hands-on sessions. All days will conclude with lessons-learned and open problems. The last day will summarise the most challenging problems faced by the teams, to drive the future P2P roadmap.
Yiannis joined Protocol Labs in 2019 to work on libp2p, IPFS, Filecoin and drand. His expertise lies on the networking stack, the protocol and architecture design of distributed, Internet-connected systems.
His passion for rigorous analysis of networked systems led him to start the ProbeLab team (https://probelab.io) which specialises in P2P layer measurement methodologies and monitoring tooling. In a previous life, Yiannis was an academic at University College London (UCL).
More information at: https://yiannisbot.net