Gossipsub Message Ordering and Consensus

Users and Developers
1

I am researching various peer to peer protocols for a distributed application I am working on. Is there any sort of built in mechanism inside of the gossipsub protocol that orders messages or ensures any sort of consensus? From what I can tell the answer is NO, and the expectation is that the application code on the node itself is responsible for this sort of activity. Is that correct?

I have looked into the RAFT protocol and understand it to enforce strong consistency across nodes and I am wondering if it would be something to implement on top of gossipsub? Though my understanding is that raft is not ideal for a situation in which nodes come and go from the network and whatever I implement would need to support that paradigm.

2

Hi @Logan

Your understanding of gossipsub is correct. Any additional integrity/ordering enforcement is a layer higher in the stack. Gossipsub just gossips messages to ensure that connected peers see the messages they are interested in.

You have an interesting question about RAFT on gossipsub. I think there’s probably papers out there on RAFT that will give you some technical information about what you’re asking about. If you don’t find anything, come back here and I’ll dig into it with you.

Cheers! :beers: