1. Research Retreat

This retreat brings together a small group of researchers, protocol architects, and infrastructure builders to work side by side on emerging challenges in decentralized systems.

Over the course of the retreat, participants will examine how evolving environments such as autonomous agents, high-churn networks, edge devices, and increasingly adversarial internet conditions are reshaping the requirements for peer to peer architectures. The retreat creates space for deep discussion, experimentation, and collaboration aimed at identifying new architectural patterns and design principles for future decentralized infrastructure.

Participants will spend the two weeks collaborating in small working groups to explore key research directions in decentralized networking.

Activities will include:

• Exploring new architectural approaches to peer to peer networking, including alternatives to traditional distributed hash tables and more scalable dissemination mechanisms beyond gossip.
• Developing and testing new ideas through rapid prototyping and open source implementations.
• Examining trust frameworks for autonomous agents and coordination primitives that do not rely on expensive global consensus.
• Investigating networking models that remain resilient under high churn, partitioned networks, or adversarial conditions.
• Sharing findings, refining ideas collaboratively, and producing research papers, prototypes, or early stage designs that can inform the next generation of decentralized systems.

2. Participant Profile

Networked Futures brings together a diverse group of approximately 20-30 participants, including:

• Peer-to-peer networking, decentralized systems researchers and distributed systems academics
• Protocol designers and core protocol developers
• Infrastructure engineers from large, decentralized networks
• Applied cryptography and security researchers
• Builders developing next-generation decentralized applications
• Builders working on distributed infra for agent identity, payments, and trust.

Participants are selected through a curated invitation and application process to ensure a strong balance between deep research expertise and practical systems-building experience. The core group of participants will be expected to attend all or most of the duration of the retreat. Guest speakers will be invited to join the retreat on selected days to share perspectives and contribute to discussions.

2.1 What's Covered

Network Futures will cover accomodations, food, and local transportation. Participants will generlaly need to cover their own travel to Berlin.

3. Call for Participation

3.1 Research Tracks

The retreat takes a cross-cutting view of decentralized systems in the below tracks, recognising the growing role of privacy-preserving services and hybrid architectures in enabling scalable, trustworthy networks. It will explore how mechanisms such as selective centralisation (e.g. supernodes), verifiable identity, and revocation can strengthen, rather than compromise, core peer-to-peer design principles.

It will also examine how these approaches perform under real-world constraints, including usability, coordination overhead, and adversarial conditions, while highlighting design patterns that balance openness with accountability.

The retreat will focus on the following research tracks:

• Scalable Communication Protocols - Explore new communication architectures, including broadcast, routing, and dissemination mechanisms capable of supporting global-scale decentralized networks without excessive bandwidth, latency, or coordination overhead.
• Agent Identity, Trust, and Security - Investigate identity, trust and value transfer for decentralized environments where nodes may be autonomous agents, ephemeral devices, or adversarial actors
• Privacy-Preserving Networking - Rethink networking architectures that minimize metadata exposure and protect communication patterns while maintaining efficient discovery, coordination, and routing in decentralized systems.
• Universal Connectivity - Design networking primitives that enable reliable communication across heterogeneous and dynamic environments, including browsers, mobile devices, satellites, and constrained or intermittently connected networks.
• Autonomous and Programmable P2P Systems - Investigate programmable networking layers that enable autonomous agents, AI systems, and decentralized applications to coordinate and interact directly across peer-to-peer infrastructure.

4. Research Location

The retreat will take place in Europe, in a remote setting near Berlin that provides the space for deep thinking, sustained collaboration, and focused research.

Surrounded by countryside and water, the setting allows participants to step away from everyday work and dedicate time to thinking deeply about the foundational problems of decentralized networking.

5. Expected Outcomes

Networked Futures aims to produce several key outcomes:

• Experimental protocol prototypes exploring new networking architectures
• Simulation frameworks for evaluating decentralized systems
• Research papers, technical reports, and design documents
• New collaborations between academic researchers and infrastructure teams

Outputs will include open research artifacts such as research papers and working prototypes, which will be shared with the broader networking and distributed systems communities.

6. About the Event

6.1 Organizing Committee

• Juan Benet - Founder, Protocol Labs
• Molly Mackinlay - Chief Executive Officer, FilOz
• Michelle Lee - Executive Director at IPFS Foundation
• Will Scott - Research Engineer Protocol Labs
• Johanna Moran - Strategy and Operations at libp2p

6.2 Contact

For questions or further information, please email: researchretreat@libp2p.io

Apply

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