A post is sealed and floods the mesh. Members (with the shared key) decrypt it and ACK back, the host counts unique ACKs as reach, with no subscriber registry; non-members carry it but can't read it. Every post is signed by its author. Channels let anyone read and write; services let only the owner broadcast.

How it works

Channels, anyone with the shared key reads and writes (group chat); every post is signed by its author, so senders are always verified.
Services, only the owner can broadcast (a service signing key), and many subscribers read with a shared content key.
A post is sealed and floods the mesh; non-members carry it blind, members decrypt and ACK back, the host counts unique ACKs as its reach, with no subscriber registry.

Why it matters

For developers

Register a topic at a path on any node and that node becomes its host. Open / request-to-join / invite control who gets the keys; per-app secrets keep other apps' topics invisible and unjoinable.

For business

Group messaging, fan-out alerts, and discoverable services with no broker to run, and on the cloud backbone a topic only ships to regions that actually have subscribers, so you never pay to flood empty ones.

Deeper implementation detail is coming in the Hop whitepaper.

← hops://Carrier transport & streams →

hps://

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