A brief overview of Kademlia and its use in various decentralized platforms
Kevin Leffew and Dylan Lott
on
engineering
•
Feb 14, 2019
Kademlia is a distributed hash table implemented in a number of modern decentralized protocols including Ethereum, BitTorrent, Swarm, IPFS and the Storj network.
Kademlia provides a way for millions of computers to self-organize into a network, communicate with other computers on the network, and share resources (e.g. files, blobs, objects) between computers, all without a central registry or lookup run by a single person or company.
Kademlia was designed by Petar Maymounkov and David Mazières in 2002, and is often said to have kickstarted the adoption of the third generation of flat-hierarchy computing protocols, as it is immensely more reliable and efficient than both centralized and flood-based approaches for node discovery and routing.Read More →