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 — STARKs 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

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.