Lean Gossip: Big Gains From Small Talk

Abstract

Gossipsub is the primary peer-to-peer dissemination protocol used by large-scale Web3 systems such as Ethereum, Filecoin, and IPFS. Despite its widespread deployment, the choice of its key parameters—the eager mesh degree D (number of peers that receive messages eagerly) and the gossip degree Dlazy (number of peers periodically notified via gossip)—has largely relied on heuristics, with little quantitative guidance. Consequently, production networks lack a principled understanding of the delivery rate, bandwidth cost, and latency tradeoffs induced by these parameters.