Iroh is a project that combines existing IETF standards in an interesting way. For example we use raw public keys in TLS for the key exchange https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7250 instead of coming up with our own key exchange scheme.

Our QUIC implementation noq is a standards compliant QUIC implementation that in addition to RFC9000 also implements the QUIC multipath draft RFC.

We try very hard not to invent new things unless absolutely necessary. In a few places we had to implement draft RFCs, QUIC multipath and QUIC NAT traversal. And there are some corners where we had to add our own extensions. But we try very hard to keep this to an absolute minimum.

Were interacting with IETF on a number of projects and so far it's been going well :)

We have an answer, but it isn't really clever. We do have both built in and pluggable address lookup services.

Our default enabled address lookup service is using DNS in a creative way, but we also have a service that is fully peer to peer and is using the mainline DHT, specifically the bep_0044 extension that allows you to store a tiny bit of arbitrary data for an Ed keypair that you control.

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html

https://pkarr.org

Some custom transports such as TOR hidden services have a discovery system built in. In these cases we can just use the existing discovery system.

See for example https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-tor-transport

The secret is that iroh still uses IPs under the hood :) But with QUIC, your connections aren't bound to your four-tuple, your connection can migrate from e.g. WiFi to Cellular with only a small blip/hiccup. And with QUIC multipath, you can have multiple four-tuples "active" at the same time. iroh uses e.g. a "real" IP path mainly, with a websocket-based HTTPS path via relay servers as the backup (e.g. in case UDP is blocked).

If you are a rust developer, you can just take a look at the examples in the iroh repo itself or in our iroh-examples repo.

None of them require an API key.

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh/tree/main/iroh/examples

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-examples

There is nothing unfree about iroh. All core crates are published with the standard MIT and Apache2 licenses.

better and faster how?

are we?