Plaintext at the ends, garbled (sealed) in transit. Copies take more than one peer path; each relay holds its stored copy until an acknowledgement comes back or the lifetime expires, then releases it.

How it works

Each datagram is handed on to every peer a carrier meets, so copies fan out on independent paths in parallel (epidemic forward).
Sealed and addressed to a key; relays carry ciphertext they can't read and keep custody of their copy until they've handed it onward.
The recipient's acknowledgement travels back as a vaccine, every node it reaches drops its copy and refuses more, collapsing the flood. Held while there's no route, until its lifetime runs out.

Why it matters

For developers

One connectionless send/receive primitive, a sealed, addressed bundle. The library handles epidemic replication, custody, retransmit with backoff, dedup, and the delivery-ACK; you manage no connections or routes. Delivery is at-least-once within the bundle's lifetime (24 hours by default), not unconditional: a bundle past its lifetime is discarded, and a carrier over its custody cap evicts the lowest-utility copy it holds.

For business

Messages get through across flaky or absent networks with nothing to operate. Delivery is eventual and at-least-once, bounded by a default 24-hour lifetime everything above inherits.

Deeper implementation detail is coming in the Hop whitepaper.

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hdp://

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