P2P Protocol

Pakit's peer-to-peer layer distributes DAG blocks across the network with cryptographic verification of every remote byte. It is purpose-built for the sovereign storage network — no dependency on external systems.

Components

Component	Design
Kademlia DHT	160-bit ID space, k-buckets for peer/block discovery
Gossip protocol	Fanout 6, TTL 10 — epidemic block propagation
Request/response	Batched retrieval with priority queues (up to 100 blocks per request)
Merkle verifier	Cryptographic validation of untrusted data
Reputation	0.0–1.0 behavioral score for peer selection
Transport	Async TCP with connection pooling (max 50 peers)

Design Goals

Sovereignty — zero external backend dependencies
Security — every remote block is hash-verified before use
Performance — target <100 ms DHT lookups, <500 ms gossip propagation
Scale — designed for 1,000+ nodes per network
Resilience — partition tolerance and automatic peer eviction

Discovery and Retrieval Flow

Client ──▶ DHT lookup (content hash)
              │
              ▼
        Provider peers ──▶ Block request (batched)
              │
              ▼
        Merkle verification ──▶ Local DAG insert

Look up the content hash in the DHT to find provider peers
Request the block batch from the best-scoring peers
Verify the Merkle proof against the requested content ID
Store only after verification succeeds

Reputation System

Peers are scored on behavior: successful block deliveries raise a peer's score, invalid or missing responses lower it. Low-reputation peers are deprioritized and eventually evicted. This keeps content integrity enforcement decentralized.

Security Model

All blocks are verified against their content hash — a malicious peer cannot inject altered data
Connection pools are bounded, limiting resource exhaustion
Peer identity is anchored to the on-chain validator registry where available