Melnet: the P2P layer

Mel uses a very simple P2P protocol, melnet, for communication among full nodes and between full nodes and light clients. Implemented as a Rust crate within the nanorpc framework, it has the following features:

• Unstructured gossip network, similar to Bitcoin (and unlike libp2p and similar DHTs)

• Uses JSON-RPC 2.0 over plain HTTP/1.1. Not even WebSockets is used.

Using simple web standards makes it easy for (still future) web-based clients written in JavaScript or WebAssembly to directly access the P2P network. In-browser light clients, or even full nodes, become possible.

Eventually, we'll have a more detailed description and spec of melnet here. For now, check out the actual codebase on GitHub!