Ongoing maintenance & stewardship — Libp2p/2025

[cewood]

Ongoing maintenance & stewardship

We will continue maintenance of popular implementations (go-libp2p & js-libp2p) as well as specs and project utilities such as libp2p transport, multiplexers, interoperability tests and performance benchmarks (are we actually doing these perf benchmarks??). Maintenance includes bug fixes, security patches, dependency handling, release management and documentation. Stewardship also includes community engagement, regular meetings, and general troubleshooting with users and potential users across forums, emails, and one-on-one calls.

Timeline

While the amount of time allocated towards maintenance can fluctuate based on community needs, we intend to allocate ~50 percent or more of our time towards it. We generally have 1x staff dedicated towards go-libp2p and 1x for js-libp2p. In addition, we have roughly 2x effective FTEs across the project to handle community work, DevRel, security WG work, and opportunistic cross project contributions, etc.

Expected impact & success criteria

• Community can consistently rely on up to date libp2p specifications, status of implementation across reference implementations, and rely on the libp2p/specs repo as the source of truth for technical direction of libp2p protocols. This involves shipping libp2p specifications that are in flight and shepherding loose ends (open questions, implementations)
• Downstream consumers of go-libp2p (and optimistically js-libp2p or others) have confidence and clarity around security processes that both increase their confidence in the project and its stewardship, and gives them confidence in a reliable and responsive, concrete communication venue between implementers and their downstreams.
• Downstream consumers of libp2p have increased confidence that their critical issues will be resolved promptly and that feature changes they make / need can land without excessive refactoring / structural pre-work
• Users of libp2p have dashboard test results they can consistently use to get a live look at the comparative metrics of various libp2p protocols over a set of releases. This is achieved by additional interoperability tests for protocols beyond just transports and hole punching (DHT, Circuit Relay, etc)