Marlin is an open-source project aimed at scaling peer-to-peer platforms by optimizing the communication between nodes. It can be best thought of as incentivized libp2p.

We use “scale” in the same sense as is commonly used in the blockchain space to mean throughput rather than the number of nodes the network can support. Nonetheless, many blockchains today are not really scalable in the traditional context of distributed systems as they make compromises on network size to optimize block time and size. Marlin supports such cases as well.

Yes and no. Marlin is similar to libp2p in that we do provide networking libraries that can be used by P2P projects to enable decentralized communication between their nodes. However, we widely differ in our focus and approach. We posit that substantial performance improvements and spam prevention requires monetary rewards and penalties in the form of staking, slashing and payments – a perspective that doesn’t seem core to libp2p’s roots.

Overlay networks.

Well, in goals, somewhat yes. But again, our approach is drastically different. While Bloxroute Labs builds proprietary infrastructures to transport and deliver blocks between nodes, we believe that building such closed ecosystems are not only the antithesis of decentralization but also severely compromise the security of blockchains. In our opinion, building a permissionless network secured by a well-designed utility token is the most viable approach to scale blockchains at the network layer without compromising on its security or decentralization.

No. While we have the codebase, cloud configurations and expertise necessary to run a BDN already, we use it only for experiments and testing purposes.

Marlin is decentralized, permissionless and open-source! While we plan to provide integrations and custom-support for as many blockchains as time allows, developers or community members can integrate Marlin with any system that can leverage the low-latency, high bandwidth optimized network connectivity that the Marlin network provides. We are always available at Riot and Discourse to provide any kind of assistance.

Yes. The LIN token is a staking token required by nodes to join the network.

No, we feel that something as fundamental as Marlin should be built over a platform that provides the strongest security guarantees. We will thus be deploying components involving smart contracts on Ethereum.

As easy as following the 5 steps on /docs.

Yes!