Network Development in Practice

In the P2P transport-stack space, libp2p has long been the default — but its protocol stack is large and its configuration surface wide; every new project ends up choosing combinations from a long list of features (tcp/quic/webrtc/noise/yamux/identify/kad/relay/dcutr). iroh is the Rust library that takes the other road: it does only QUIC + dial-by-public-key + NAT traversal, collapses the transport layer into something small, and layers three optional modules on top (blobs/gossip/docs). On June 15, 2026, n0 released iroh 1.0 with the slogan “Dial Keys, not IPs” — the first stable release after 4 years of development and 65 pre-release versions.