radio

Verified content streaming over Poseidon2.

Radio is a fork of iroh where every hash — content identifiers, verified streaming trees, relay handshakes — runs through Poseidon2 over the Goldilocks field instead of BLAKE3.

Why replace a fast hash with a slow one?

BLAKE3 hashes at 2 GB/s. Poseidon2 over Goldilocks hashes at ~50-100 MB/s on CPU. By every throughput benchmark, BLAKE3 wins.

But throughput is the wrong metric when the goal is a self-verifying knowledge graph at planetary scale.

BLAKE3 uses bit-oriented operations — XOR, rotation, shift — that are cheap on CPUs and catastrophic in arithmetic circuits. Proving a single BLAKE3 hash inside a STARK costs 50,000-100,000 constraints. Poseidon2 costs ~300. That is not a percentage improvement. It is the difference between a system that can prove its own state transitions and one that cannot.

A content-addressed network where every hash is cheaply provable in zero knowledge enables:

• Storage proofs that verify content availability without downloading it
• Verified streaming where every chunk is authenticated against a Poseidon2 Merkle tree
• Private collective computation over encrypted knowledge graphs (MPC, FHE)
• Post-quantum security — zheng proofs rely on hash collision resistance only, no pairings

One hash everywhere. No "fast hash for data, ZK hash for proofs" split. The content identifier IS the proof-friendly identifier. Deduplication, verified streaming, and zero-knowledge proofs all operate on the same identity.

The performance gap narrows with GPU acceleration (Poseidon2 is massively parallelizable) and larger chunk groups (16 KB blocks amortize per-chunk overhead). For the proving system, there is no gap at all — Poseidon2 is 100x cheaper where it matters.

See hash function selection for the full analysis across seven domains: content addressing, deduplication, ZK proofs, MPC, FHE, quantum resistance, and planetary scale.

Architecture

Application authority is separate from endpoint authentication. The neuron context contract defines how robot subjects, devices and signed application requests compose without changing transport IDs.

Radio preserves iroh's networking layer — QUIC connections, hole-punching, relay servers — and replaces the cryptographic substrate:

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        Protocols                             │
│   iroh-blobs    iroh-docs    iroh-gossip    iroh-willow      │
│   (content)     (key-value)  (pub-sub)      (sync)           │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                    Verified Streaming                         │
│                       cyber-bao                               │
│            (Poseidon2 Merkle tree encode/decode)              │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                     Content Identity                          │
│                    hemera                             │
│       (sponge, compression, KDF — Goldilocks field)           │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                       Networking                              │
│               iroh (QUIC, hole-punching)                      │
│              iroh-relay (relay servers)                        │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Crates

Hemera Parameters

Frozen at deployment. These never change — changing them changes every content identifier in the network.

Migration Status

Complete. Zero BLAKE3 dependencies remain in any Cargo.toml or Cargo.lock. 395 tests pass across all crates.

Getting Started

# Build the workspace
cargo build

# Run tests
cargo test

# Hash something
cargo run --bin particle -- "hello"

License

Copyright 2025 N0, INC.

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.