"Lightweight" browser-based Hydra node

[abailly-iohk]

Why

Most user-facing applications nowadays run in a sandboxed environment, eg. a web browser, on "edge" devices, eg. mobile phones, or behind firewalls, VPNs, NAT IPs, etc. Direct participation in a Hydra network currently requires running a node that is interconnected to other nodes through long-running TCP sockets, which is less than ideal in most settings.

To make Hydra a fully decentralised scaling network for Cardano, we need to allow arbitrary formation of peer-to-peer ad-hoc networks. Note this will still leave pending the issue of how to connect securely and without an intermediary to the L1 network, but that's another story :)

What

CIP-45 details an interesting technique to enable p2p communication between Web apps through WebRTC, mediated by WebTorrent trackers (to provide DNS-like discovery of peers). There's a Ts implementation of the base protocol which is based on this WebRTC Data Channel standard.

Hydra nodes could use this protocol for interconnection, thus making it possible to implement nodes in a wide variety of environments.

How

No response