P2P Networking

The OP Stack uses P2P networking on the consensus layer to share the sequencer's view of the L2 chain with other nodes on the network. L2 blocks shared via P2P are considered "unsafe", and will be reorganized to match the canonical chain, prioritizing L1.

This means that behavior on the P2P layer does not affect the rollup security. As such, rules around banning and scoring peers based on their P2P gossip is policy - it is up to the user to ultimately choose a configuration best for them.

To understand how the P2P is hooked up to the kona-node, jump to the P2P Actor section below. Otherwise, read on to learn more about the details of the P2P stack.

Topography

The P2P stack topography consists of the following.

• Discovery of peers via discv5.
• Gossip and peer connection management through libp2p.
• Publishing and validation of gossip by the node.

In the kona-node, these layers are split up into modular components either as modules or distinct crates.

Discovery

Kona's discovery layer is encapsulated in a "driver" called the Discv5Driver. When started, the driver spawns a new thread to handle discv5::Discv5 events from its event stream as well as metrics requests from the kona-node. A "handler" is returned by the consumed Discv5Driver which allows other components of the kona-node to communicate through channels to the spawned discv5::Discv5 service.

When peers are discovered by kona's discovery service, their "ENR"s need to be validated to ensure those peers are participating in the right network gossip. Ethereum Node Records (ENRs) and how they are validated is discussed in a later section. After their ENRs are validated, they are forwarded to the consumer (in kona's case libp2p) which establishes and manages the connection to the node.

There are also a few more notable functions of Kona's discovery driver.

• Every X seconds it attempts to discover random ENRs. This is configurable using Discv5Builder::with_interval
• Every Y seconds it evicts a random ENR from the discovery table to keep peer discovery fresh. This is configurable using Discv5Builder::with_discovery_randomize.
• Every Z seconds it stores it's ENR table at a configurable location so if the service is restarted, it doesn't need to rediscover peers, it can just use the stored peers. The interval is configurable using Discv5Builder::with_store_interval.

Gossip

L2 blocks on the OP Stack not otherwise derived from L1 are shared over TCP in the P2P network of nodes. Unsafe L2 blocks shared this way originate from the sequencer.

In the kona-node, L2 block gossip is handled through the libp2p Swarm. The GossipDriver is the component in the kona-node that manages the libp2p swarm, including any interfacing with the swarm like dialing peers, publishing payloads (L2 blocks), handling events from the swarm, and more.

The GossipDriver provides the methods to handle events from the libp2p Swarm. Events should be consumed this way in order to use the connection gater as well as peer store and fields on the GossipDriver.

The libp2p Swarm listens on a specified Multiaddr.

L2 Block Publishing

As mentioned in the previous section, L2 blocks are published as payloads through the libp2p Swarm, which is done using the GossipDriver. The actual payload type that is published is an OpNetworkPayloadEnvelope, which is well documented in the OP Stack P2P Specs.

L2 blocks published through the GossipDriver are published on a "topic". The topic is used by the gossipsub protocol to publish the message on that given topic, allowing peers to choose which topics they wish to subscribe to.

L2 Block Validation

L2 blocks are validated in kona through a trait-abstracted "block handler". Since messages in the libp2p mesh network are snappy compressed, they need to be decompressed and then decoded for the correct block topic those messages are published on.

Only once the OpNetworkPayloadEnvelope is successfully decoded for the corresponding block topic, is the block validated.

As of writing these docs, block validation follows a few rules.

• The timestamp is between 60 seconds in the past and at most 5 seconds in the future.
• The block hash is valid. This is checked by transforming the paylaod into a block and then hashing the block header to produce the payload hash.
• The contents of the payload envelope are correct for its version. Since different versions introduce new contents to the payload from hardforks, the forwards-compatible payload envelope cannot have fields with content that don't exist for previous versions.
• The block signature is valid.

Node Identification

TODO

P2P Actor

TODO