Yggdrasil is an experimental compact routing scheme that is fully decentralised
38 comments
·May 7, 2025gerdesj
Some of us are old enough to remember a Linux distro called Yggdrasil. It was my first but certainly not my last.
Does this thing involve a MAC address?
makeworld
AFAIK no MAC addresses are involved. It assigns you a new IP address, internal to the network, a bit like a VPN.
evbogue
yah it's good for logging into computers or accessing servers behind NAT. It's kinda an antidote to this world that's still hooked on ipv4 like it's 1992 or whatever.
mindcrime
Previously on HN (sadly no discussion though)
beanjuiceII
some of us even still have Yggdrasil installation media
throwaway984393
[dead]
gnabgib
Recently popular:
5 months ago (324 points, 107 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42155780
2022 (216 points, 78 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30156551
2019 as a Show (120 points, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18863554
easygenes
If this is interesting to you, there's also a new edge mesh protocol which would dovetail into it well called MeshCore. MeshCore is LoRa and MCU focused, works at L2. Ygg is L3 and could run at e.g. your LoRa SBC gateway to provide seamless global distribution of edge mesh chats and sensor relays.
https://github.com/ripplebiz/MeshCore https://youtu.be/fNWf0Mh2fJw https://chatgpt.com/share/681c281f-0a24-8011-8ec9-6d58ce3db0...
Calliope1
Yggdrasil: A decentralized, self-healing, cryptographically addressed network of the future?
It’s redefining what “being connected” means — no ISPs, no central config, fully peer-organized routing, and resilient to constant topology shifts.
The real question: If Yggdrasil can scale to real-world mesh networks, do we still need the traditional internet backbone? Or… could it become the true foundation for edge computing?
Yasuraka
This reeks of LLM
xingped
If you care about performance, I don't think any amount or style of mesh networking will outperform traditional backbones.
Calliope1
That’s a fair point — performance-wise, traditional backbones are incredibly hard to beat.
But maybe the value of Yggdrasil isn’t in outrunning the backbone — it’s in outlasting it. In unstable or disconnected environments, resilience, autonomy, and zero-setup connectivity might matter more than raw speed.
So perhaps it's not about replacement, but complement — building networks that keep working when the backbone doesn't.
bawolff
Is there a paper somewhere explaining their system in detail?
pharos92
Shortest path is fundamentally problematic in networks. The shortest path isn't always the best path.
The shortest path might be a 1Mbps link with high latency. The 'best' path might be several 100Mbps links with low latency chain together.
easygenes
Ygg doesn't operate strictly as a shortest path protocol. It prefers lowest latency links already and they're roadmapped to handle link cost / dynamic weighting / link congestion. They're targeting a blended weighted metric overlay which would certainly prefer the chain of quick/fat links.
jazzyjackson
I ask as someone hyped about decentralized protocol but only following ygg from a distance -- who are they building it for, is there a use case or commercial customer that wants this, or is it more of an idealistic/political endeavor ? I guess I'm wondering how mature the org behind it is, if they're setup for the long haul or taking steps forward when they can, on a hobbyist basis.
kachapopopow
Why do I remember minecraft using yggdrasil at some point. Maybe just a name clash of a java library.
Centigonal
awkwardpotato
FYI, the Minecraft Fandom wiki is no longer maintained. The new wiki is https://minecraft.wiki/w/Yggdrasil
codetrotter
Yggdrasil is from Norse mythology. So I’m not surprised that a bunch of different people name software after it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil
Just like many might pick cool and important names from Greek mythology for example, like Poseidon.
DigiEggz
Brings to mind the system that rules over the Digital World :)
jazzyjackson
wow thanks for the link, the UFO style ring interface floating over a honeycomb is extremely similar to a GUI I designed once, didn't realize Digimon had prior art on it.
privong
Indeed; Yggdrasil is also the name of a set of models of the emission from stellar populations:
api
The challenge with these schemes is always making them robust against intentional attacks.
It’s hard enough to do that for centrally regulated systems. There are whole giant companies like Cloudflare that mostly exist to do that.
With a fully decentralized mesh if someone finds a working attack there is no good way to coordinate a response.
Small hobby and research nets can get away with that, but if anything like this ever got popular or even close to mainstream it would be destroyed. This is especially true if there were any way to make money by ruining it.
Animats
> The challenge with these schemes is always making them robust against intentional attacks.
Right. You join the network by generating a random IPv6 address and telling someone about it. So anyone can generate vast numbers of dummy node addresses, which everybody has to track. Now you need spam filtering.
Centigonal
Another related issue is that decentralized networks are often targeted by attackers more than centralized ones, since a common use case for these networks is sharing information that the central entity (or some power that can coerce the central entity) does not want shared, e.g. organizing in authoritarian regimes, illegal file sharing
jazzyjackson
I don't know how ygg handles nodes but there's no reason a mesh network has to just accept random new peers, you could do something like mTLS where peers have to present certificates distributed out of band.
fsflover
Could you solve this by running something like I2P on top of the mesh network? I2P has implemented strong protections against typical attacks.
orbisvicis
Is firewalling the yggdrasil adapter susceptible to IP spoofing?
null
cyberax
Interesting. There's a fundamental vulnerability in mesh routing: you either have to control addressing, or a malicious actor can flood the network topology with bogus data.
Just imagine somebody generating 10000000000 addresses and flooding everybody with that information.
It looks like Yggdrasil doesn't address (ha) this vulnerability? It kinda side-steps it by requiring enrollment through an already trusted node?
I was intrigued by Yggdrasil, so much that I built a similar network, also using concepts of other networks in that realm.
It uses a logical world map for improved address space allocation and routing as well as source routing. Private non-routable addresses for better privacy are planned.
https://mycoria.org
It will see more development over the next years, as I will be using it in an upcoming project.
Happy to answer any questions you have here.