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.
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.
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 │
│ cyber-poseidon2 │
│ (sponge, compression, KDF — Goldilocks field) │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Networking │
│ iroh (QUIC, hole-punching) │
│ iroh-relay (relay servers) │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
| Crate | Description |
|---|---|
cyber-poseidon2 |
Poseidon2 hash over Goldilocks (Hemera: t=16, rate=8, capacity=8, x^7). CPU backend via p3-poseidon2, GPU scaffolding via wgpu. |
cyber-bao |
Verified streaming with Poseidon2. Encoding, decoding, outboard, slice extraction — the BAO protocol rebuilt on algebraic hashing. |
cyber-hash |
CLI tool for Poseidon2 hashing from the command line. |
iroh |
Hole-punching and QUIC connections between endpoints. Dial by public key. |
iroh-relay |
Relay server with Poseidon2-based handshake. |
iroh-base |
Common types — Hash (Poseidon2 digest), keys, RelayUrl. |
iroh-blobs |
Content-addressed blob transfer with Poseidon2 verified streaming. Scales from kilobytes to terabytes. |
iroh-docs |
Eventually-consistent key-value store over iroh-blobs. |
iroh-gossip |
Publish-subscribe overlay networks. |
iroh-car |
CAR (Content Addressable aRchive) format support. |
iroh-willow |
Willow protocol implementation. |
iroh-dns-server |
DNS-based endpoint discovery. |
Frozen at deployment. These never change — changing them changes every content identifier in the network.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Field | Goldilocks (p = 2^64 - 2^32 + 1) |
| State width | 16 elements (128 bytes) |
| Rate | 8 elements (64 bytes absorbed per permutation) |
| Capacity | 8 elements (64 bytes) |
| Full rounds | 8 (4 initial + 4 final) |
| Partial rounds | 64 |
| S-box | x^7 |
| Padding | 0x01 || 0x00* |
| Encoding | Little-endian canonical |
| Output | 8 elements = 64 bytes |
| Security | 256-bit collision resistance |
Complete. Zero BLAKE3 dependencies remain in any Cargo.toml or Cargo.lock. 395 tests pass across all crates.
| Phase | Status |
|---|---|
| cyber-poseidon2 (CPU + GPU scaffolding) | Done |
| cyber-bao (verified streaming) | Done |
| iroh-blobs (content addressing) | Done |
| iroh-relay (handshake) | Done |
| iroh-docs, iroh-gossip, iroh-car | Done |
| Blake3 removal | Done |
| Validation (395 tests, 0 failures) | Done |
# Build the workspace
cargo build
# Run tests
cargo test
# Hash something
cargo run --bin cyber-hash -- "hello"Copyright 2025 N0, INC.
Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.