24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan

April 16, 2026 · 36 min

About this episode

Johnathan Corgan joins Gigi to discuss the development and implications of FIPS networking protocols.

“Don’t be afraid of going your own way.” Johnathan Corgan & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07 . Listen on sovereignengineering.io In this dialogue: Why FIPS started with Arjen asking for networking that does not depend on registrars, central authorities, or yankable domain names Johnathan disappearing for a month after Costa Rica, then returning with a protocol design that scratched the itch FIPS as a self-organizing peer mesh: no privileged coordinator, only what each node can enforce locally Transport-agnostic networking: Ethernet, Bluetooth, UDP overlays, Tor, serial links, and whatever else can move packets A hilariously impractical but very useful test: tunneling FIPS over Nostr relays, with ping times measured in seconds, and it still worked Why robustness under ugly conditions matters more than looking elegant on the happy path 150 nodes already on the FIPS testnet, and what has to change to get from 150 to 1,500 to 15,000 Friday Demo Day as the forcing function: build it, show it, let other people poke holes in it The next FIPS release: fewer unnecessary pieces, stronger protocol negotiation, harder internals, more battle testing “Try to break it” so…

People in this episode

Host: Gigi

Guest: Johnathan Corgan

Topics covered

peer mesh networking
protocol design
transport-agnostic networking
FIPS testnet
robustness in networking
Cypherpunk energy
Nostr relays

Keywords

FIPS
networking
protocol design
peer mesh
robustness
Nostr
Cypherpunk
Bitcoin

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: FIPS, SEC-07, Nostr, sovereignengineering.io, Cypherpunk, Bitcoin

Places: Madeira