A whitepaper describing the architecture of Freenet: contracts as application-defined join-semilattices, summary/delta synchronization, small-world adaptive routing, and the delegate model for private state.
What it covers
The whitepaper is design-oriented. It describes the architecture as currently
implemented in the freenet-core reference runtime, summarizes a 24-hour
live-network measurement of routing path lengths, and is explicit about which
mechanisms are deployed, which remain experimental, and which are open problems.
Section headings:
- The problem
- Design thesis
- Core primitives (peers, contracts, delegates, user interfaces)
- How updates move (the merge algebra, summary/delta sync, subscription trees)
- How data is found (small-world routing, adaptive routing, live-network measurement)
- Security and trust boundaries
- Implementation status and open problems
- Related work
- Conclusion
Source: github.com/freenet/paper-1.
Citing
Clarke, I. (2026). Freenet: A Peer-to-Peer Platform for Real-Time
Decentralized Applications. https://freenet.org/whitepaper/
There is also an AI-generated video overview of the paper produced by Google NotebookLM. The paper itself is the canonical source; the overview is less precise.