Ethereum 2.0's Nodes Need to Talk

While many aspects of the upgrade are still under research and presently being finalized, on April 23 new code was unveiled that, if approved and ultimately implemented, will facilitate the basic communication between nodes that run the ethereum 2.0 software.

The protocol, called Hobbits, was developed in partnership between blockchain performance testing company Whiteblock, ethereum venture capital studio Consensys, and ethereum 2.0 implementer teams Chainsafe and Yeeth.

"As Ethereum 2.0 clients get closer to live testnets, they're going to need a way to pass information back and forth between each client. This occurs over a set of links called the wire protocol."

The wire protocol gets at the heart of how these distributed networks work, because nodes pass critical information between one another - namely transaction histories - that compose the blockchain itself.

Speaking to CoinDesk back in February, ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin explained that a wire protocol essentially determines "The rules for what messages get sent across the network."

If two nodes talk to each other and one node wants to sync to the blockchain or publish a block, then how do you say I want to hear about a block? How do you say I want to hear about transactions?" Buterin told CoinDesk.

Ethereum 2.0 will be actually be leveraging a wire protocol called "Libp2p" developed and maintained by San Francisco-based startup Protocol Labs, the firm behind projects like Filecoin and IPFS. However, until that implementation is fleshed out for all ethereum 2.0 clients, Hobbits is envisioned as a means to establish cross-communication between those clients who don't have libp2p ready.

"We don't have libp2p yet so we needed to find a minimum wire protocol, sort of like a test wire protocol, just until we can put all the pieces together."

For bitcoin and ethereum presently, the wire protocol uses what are called gossip networks.

The new ethereum 2.0 wire protocol - libp2p - will have two major benefits.