GoKawiilIt's a simple idea really, and it's the right abstraction for the future of the internet. IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control. Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. They stay the same as your device moves, and are yours to throw away, or not. IP addresses can be private and inaccessible behind firewalls, but with iroh your device can be securely addressable no matter where it is.
We think this is how the internet should work, which is why iroh exists, and today we're delighted to announce iroh version 1.0.
This is our first stable release, but the project has grown significantly over the 65 versions that led to 1.0. iroh is already used all over the place. The public relays we run have seen more than 200 million endpoints created, in the last 30 days alone. Developers are using iroh to stream video, train large language models, talk to agents, secure chats, play games, send files, and many more things than we could jam into this list. Iroh is a fundamental technology aimed at a fundamental shift in the internet, and it's running on millions of devices today.
After more than 4 years of building in the open, we have a foundation we're both proud of.
We shifted onto open standards, preferring IETF drafts whenever possible
We built our own implementation of QUIC multipath, so iroh can build & manage multiple routes within the same connection, and hot swap paths as conditions change
We implemented QUIC NAT traversal, so we can establish direct connections while keeping connection details encrypted
We added full local-first configurations so iroh can find & connect to local devices, without internet access
We built & continually check that iroh can compile to WASM & run in the browser
We worked with power users to add hooks, so you can inject logic to control how connections should work
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