Exploring Delegated Routing & Bootstrap-less Peer Discovery in Hybrid libp2p Setups

[seetadev]

Hi all 👋

While working on universal-connectivity, I wanted to share a quick summary of how peer discovery and connectivity mechanisms have evolved — particularly for Node.js and browser peers interacting with Rust/Go peers.

✅ Current Behavior

Earlier, js-libp2p setups included both:

• A list of bootstrap nodes (static multiaddrs, e.g. /ip4/.../tcp/...)
• One or more relayListenAddrs

But recently, as seen in PR #225, this was simplified to rely only on relayListenAddrs and remove the static bootstrap config.

Why? Because we now use:

🔍 Delegated Routing — to discover the real-time multiaddrs of known bootstrap peers using only their PeerId.

This avoids the need for hardcoded multiaddrs, especially since many bootstrap nodes (in Go/Rust) have ephemeral addresses.

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🌐 Example

With delegated routing, a JS peer can discover and dial another peer like this:

const peer = await node.peerRouting.findPeer(peerId, { useCache: false })
await node.dial(peer.id)

See:
🔗 Delegated routing example

The endpoint used is typically the public IPFS delegated routing service:

https://delegated-ipfs.dev

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🔄 Browser ↔ Node ↔ Rust Connectivity

• WebRTC enables direct browser ↔ Node.js connections in universal-connectivity.
• In hybrid environments, Node.js peers can also connect to Rust/Go peers via circuit relay, as long as the routing and relay config are in place.
• Since the Rust peers often don’t advertise stable multiaddrs, delegated routing lets us find them by PeerId and then relay/dial dynamically.

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🧪 Reproducible Setup

For those experimenting with hybrid TCP/WebSocket relayed connections (e.g., Rust <-> Node.js), we’ve tested:

• JS peers using only relayListenAddrs + delegated routing
• Rust nodes configured as circuit relay servers
• Successful connection via /p2p-circuit once resolved

Let me know if you’d like a sample repo or Docker setup for this.

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🔗 References

• fix: only set circuit relay listen and simplify universal-connectivity#225
• https://github.com/libp2p/js-libp2p-bootstrap
• https://github.com/Nkovaturient/js-libp2p-examples
• https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/public-utilities/#delegated-routing

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Would love to hear how others are approaching hybrid peer discovery — and happy to provide code or support if anyone's trying this setup with Go/Rust/JS interop!