INFORMED DIFFUSION: MAKING HOME BUILDERS PUBLISH FAST

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Informed Diffusion is a four-tier gossip protocol that cuts home-builder payload delivery from 6.3 seconds to 0.63 seconds P99, matching and surpassing the 1.8-second benchmark datacenter builders achieve on mixed-bandwidth networks. Pipelining, push/pull chunk announcement, erasure coding, and neighbor-aware scheduling via per-payload HAVE bitmaps reduce bandwidth utilization from 4.4 to 1.7 payload copies and hold delivery under the 3-second budget against 50% withholding nodes, 10 Mbps throttled uplinks, and payloads ranging from 128 KiB to 2 MiB. The sole wire protocol addition is HAVE bitmaps carried in existing gossipsub control messages, with all other improvements left to local client implementation, allowing adoption without mesh topology changes or new topics.