Duncan Coutts is one of the great unsung heroes of the Cardano universe. He was instrumental in the original design of the node and networking layer, including the “secret weapon” of the Hard Fork Combinator that enables seamless protocol upgrades without needing to hard fork the chain.
Duncan has been working on the P2P networking layer for a while and it’s now ready to go live on Mainnet. We are running a couple of our relays in P2P mode while it beds in, ready for a full roll out in the coming month.
This is a really important step on the road to complete decentralisation that will make the network significantly more robust and secure. Duncan shared details in a recent YouTube update, embedded below for convenience.