The ProbeLab team is helping engineering teams get a better understanding of the operational and protocol details of the P2P layer of their network. With those insights, engineering teams can apply optimisations to their network-layer protocols. We have been developing measurement and monitoring tooling for the P2P layer of blockchains for IPFS and libp2p-based networks for the past several years.

The majority of the results we produce can be found at: https://probelab.io

Things we have done:

• Weekly network health reports for the IPFS network: https://github.com/probe-lab/network-measurements/tree/main/reports
• Weekly network health reports for the Ethereum discv5 DHT network: https://probelab.io/discv5/2024-09/ (Week 9, 2024)
• Bootstrapper monitoring for the Filecoin network: https://probelab.io/bootstrappers/filecoin
• Several studies on IPFS and libp2p (e.g., see NAT Hole Punching): https://github.com/probe-lab/network-measurements/tree/main/results

Things we plan to do with this funding (in priority order, depending on funding amount):

• Extend our Nebula crawler to provide weekly reports for other L2s on Ethereum (e.g., provide support for Optimism).
• Extend bootstrapper monitoring for the Ethereum network.
• Build a tool to monitor the DHT keyspace density for Ethereum’s discv5 DHT network to detect potential eclipse attacks.
• Extend our Hermes platform to monitor Gossipsub operation for the Ethereum network: https://github.com/probe-lab/hermes
• Build simulation or emulation tools to identify the right protocol (or protocol combination) for DAS on Ethereum (https://notes.ethereum.org/@djrtwo/das-requirements).

Impact: Our tools and tailor-made studies have traditionally helped engineering teams to adjust their protocols’ settings and optimise performance with regard to: bandwidth consumption requirements, latency reduction, CPU consumption requirement, infrastructure and node operation cost optimisation.

Examples include:

• the Hydra Dial Down on the IPFS network, which saved millions in infrastructure cost.
• the libp2p NAT Hole Punching study, which helped fix bugs and improve performance of the technique.