Pear Runtime: Zero-Infrastructure, P2P High-Scale Applications

My name is David, and I'm the creator, along with my team, of Pair Runtime. This is about zero infrastructure, high-scale applications, but it's also an appeal to humanity in a way.

Let me ask this. What is the net total output of, like systemically speaking, of all of our human activities? Where is it taking us?

Pair is a peer-to-peer runtime. By peer-to-peer, I mean fully peer-to-peer. Local state, not like blockchain which is global state and federated, but literally peer-to-peer. The data lives on user devices and only on user devices. No cloud. Nothing. Just the peers. To show that it is what we say it is, Pair is open source. It's been open source since February. You can look through all of the code and verify that it is, in fact, peer-to-peer, and that no data is being harvested because it cannot actually be. It can't be.

If you have Node installed, you can bootstrap Pair immediately with MPX Pair. This installs a small Node script which bootstraps Pair from the peers. Pair is not Node. It's its own thing. You can use MPX Pair to install Pair from the peers at any time you like. As I say, it's fully open source, so feel free to look through before you do so.

It's a runtime. It installs a CLI. The CLI has a run command, pair run, the Pair protocol, and then a key. That key is a topic on a distributed hash table, a global distributed hash table that allows peers to discover each other and connect directly.

If you have pair installed, you can run pair run pair keet. This will open the Keet application. This is an application that has been built on Pair for messaging. It runs on desktop and mobile. You can scan this QR code to get it on mobile on the Play Store and the App Store. When you look down on the App Store and Play Store, you will see that both Apple and Google have verified that the application collects no data.

Pair is a development tool. It's a CLI tool that you can use to actually create Pair applications. These are the development commands. Pair init to create a Pair project, Pair stage which copies your file system state into a P2P structure called HyperCore, and Pair run, which you can use to run both local folders and keys from the DHT, application keys. Again, there is no infrastructure involved here. This is just peers talking to each other. The applications load from peers.

Pair is a deployment tool. These are some of the deployment commands. Pair seed. It seeds the P2P state to the DHT, to the distributed hash table, and allows others to then run from that seed. If you think of BitTorrent, it's like a next-generation BitTorrent, but the applications are representations, materialised views of append-only logs which are then torrented between the peers. Pair stage is a deployment tool because it's how you release. It's all about whether you share your key. You can have a public key, you can have a private key for the applications, an internal key, say. Pair release marks releases on a core.

Pair is a JavaScript runtime. Not only is it written in JavaScript, but it is also literally a JavaScript runtime because Pair is Bear. Bear is another project that we've made at HolePunch alongside Pair. They came up together. It's a minimal JavaScript runtime for desktop and mobile. We use it in both our mobile and our desktop app. We're moving to an architecture where both the desktop and the mobile apps run the same exact code in a worker, and then the UIs talk to them, and that code runs in Bear. It's a very, very fast node-like runtime with first-class support for P2P primitives. Therefore, Pair is also a native runtime, as well as a JavaScript runtime. You can run native modules with Bear. You can write straight up C, seed that out, and others can run that from you as a peer. No infrastructure, no cloud, nothing, just the peers.

Pair is a platform.

Pair is a platform. We do terminal applications, desktop applications, mobile applications. We'll have more coming. There's APIs. There's configuration. And beyond that, Pair also builds itself. We build the platform with the platform. All those commands I showed you, we also use to make Pair itself. We make Pair with Pair. Pair is a way to build. See docs.pairs.com. We have tools, we have helpers, we have building blocks, we have how-tos, we have videos. We have everything you need to get started on building Pair application, and you'd be surprised how simple the architectures can become when you don't need infrastructure.

Pair is data secure. Inherently data secure. A company can't leak passwords if it doesn't have them. A political organization cannot mass-manipulate user data if they don't have it. That is true security. Users are vulnerable currently. Pair is unstoppable. Literally unstoppable. We use a hole-punching algorithm that bypasses NAT restrictions so that you can completely connect peers. It breaks through firewalls. Pair is for the peers. It's for us. It's for people. People as people. Think about it.

Thank you very much.