EASY1 Stake Pool is now fully P2P

It has a long way coming, but finally, after the green light given by IOG and the broader SPO community, I’ve pull the trigger and updated the EASY1 Stake Pool to fully and solely relay on P2P configuration.

What does this mean?

Back in 2020, when the Shelly update was released and with it the decentralisation era begun, SPOs had to manually configure the so called network topology, a file containing several hundred lines of configuration where peers relays were selected and configured.

Most of SPOs like me, had to join several telegram and discord groups to ensure their relays were added to other major SPOs to ensure transactions were promptly received by the Stake Pool and blocks quickly propagated.

With the time semi-automated approaches were created to facilitate updating the list of peers, but nothing final as the P2P protocol eventually released by IOG.

EASY1 Stake Pool has been pioneering the P2P configuration since the very beginning and, as soon as it was available, I’ve alway been running a node in P2P mode to report on issues and feedback to IOG.

After a couple of years of trial and error, finally IOG and the broader SPO community have reached consensus that the P2P protocol has reached maturity and, in case of appetite, SPOs can confidently switch to the new protocol.

How does the P2P protocol work?

Without going into too many details, a P2P protocol is a protocol where participants can discover other participants without consulting a centralised list, but solely relying on the actual p2p discovery protocol.

Earlier in the days, the so called topology was, more often than not, manually populated. Now relays can bootstrap and discover peers by reading the blockchain.

Other SPOs like me, can in fact declare their public relays in the Stake Pool registration certificate so to allow other participants to find them.

Today, I’ve in fact cleared out all the topology files, set p2p mode to all my relays, updated the public list of relays, and restarted all the relevant relays.

The P2P Era at EASY1 Stake Pool has just begun!

Operations! Operations! Operations!

Not always more is better, but in this case it is. As we launch towards the next bull run, I’ve decided to increase the number of public relays managed by the EASY1 Stake Pool. In recent months we increased from 2 public relays, both located in Central Europe, to 4, an additional relay in europe, and another one in the United States.

January 2024 I’ve extended operations into Asia, and spun up another relay in Singapore.

By the end of February one more relay will join the EASY1 network in the United States, this time on the east coast. This will be relay number 6.

All these relays will be connected to each other and will represent beacons in the most remote regions of the world. This network will ensure that transaction initiated anywhere in the world will be promptly captured by the EASY1 Stake Pool and persisted on ledger, at the same time will contribute to further reduce the already amazing block propagation time of the pool.

This upgrade will make of the EASY1 Stake Pool one of the most advanced configuration currently available in the Cardano Ecosystem.

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