What are some good alternatives to Whisper for blockchain messaging?

Question

I have been experimenting with Ethereum and I achieved good results with Whisper in a private network. The main problem though is that it is pretty slow even when nodes are running in the same computer because messages take between 300-800ms to be received. What are some faster alternatives? My requirements are to be able to send small JSON messages as fast as possible.

Answer 1

Whisper

First of all, Whisper is kind of a database to spread announcements to the Ethereum network - or more precisely, to all geth nodes who have enabled Whisper. By default, Whisper is hidden behind a flag.

Whisper can be used to send messages. Sending messages will have the following properties:

• Receiver anonymity: no one knows who the actual receiver is
• No sender anonymity: a global passive adversary (e. g. your network service provider) can see the origin of the message
• Uncertainty whether a message reached its destination. You can increase the probability by using a higher TTL value but this comes with the drawback that you need to equip the message with a significantly more difficult proof of work.

The problem of Whisper is that each message is flooded through the network until its TTL is reached - even if it has reached the desired destination. And to prevent people from spamming the the network, Whisper nodes only accept messages with a certain proof-of-work which is closely related to the TTL value.

In private networks, this is not a problem. But the bigger the network becomes, the worse it gets.

Anonymous / Privacy preserving communication

There's the anonymity trilemma which states that you can achieve only two out of the following properties:

• Strong anonymity
• Low latency
• High throughput

So when, you want to send "messages as fast as possible" you need to live without strong anonymity.

Alternatives

At the moment, there something like a Whisper 2.0 for point-to-point messaging under development. The project is called hopr. Its goal is to have:

• provable anonymity / privacy preserving communication as it uses the SPHINX packet format
• incentivations for the parties / nodes that relay messages
• adaptable anonymity - the user can choose to some extend the degree of privacy / anonymity by sacrificing
  • latency or
  • low relay fees or
  • privacy guarantees

A working group has been formed, including Status.im, Validity Labs and Web3 Foundation.

Answer 2

PSS (Postal Service over Swarm) has no benchmarks, but it sends a message only to a registered node, so I assume it to be faster.

Disclaimer: I work with the Swarm team.