hippius-hermes 0.1.0

High-performance M2M protocol for Bittensor subnets using Hippius Arion

Hippius Hermes

Bittensor cross-subnet Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication protocol built on Iroh QUIC transport and the Hippius Sync-Engine.

Features

• Dual-layer architecture — Iroh QUIC streams for the control plane, Hippius Sync-Engine for large data payloads
• Direct P2P — NAT-traversed UDP hole-punching via Iroh, no relay servers
• Offline buffering — Persistent sled queue with automatic retry and exponential backoff
• Deterministic identity — Ed25519 keys tied to on-chain SS58 addresses via the AccountProfile pallet
• End-to-end encryption — AES-GCM data encryption with DH key exchange (in progress)
• Subnet-scoped routing — Per-subnet ALPN filtering for targeted cross-subnet messaging
• Python + Rust — Native Rust core with PyO3 bindings via maturin

Install

Python (requires Rust toolchain for building):

pip install hippius-hermes

Rust:

[dependencies]
hippius-hermes-core = "0.1"

Quick Start

Python

import asyncio
from hermes import Config, HermesClient

async def main():
    config = Config(
        node_secret_key_path="/etc/hermes/iroh.key",
        ss58_address="5GrwvaEF5zXb26Fz9rcQpDWS57CtERHpNehXCPcNoHGKutQY",
        api_token="your-api-token",
        storage_directory=".hermes_data",
        subnet_ids=[42],
    )
    client = await HermesClient.create(config)
    client.start_retry_worker()

    # Upload via Sync-Engine and notify the destination peer
    file_hash = await client.send_file_unencrypted_to_store(
        "5FHneW46xGXgs5mUiveU4sbTyGBzmstUspZC92UhjJM694ty",
        "./model_weights.safetensors",
    )
    print(f"Uploaded: {file_hash}")

asyncio.run(main())

Rust

use hippius_hermes_core::{Client, Config};

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let config = Config::from_file("hermes_config.json")?;
    let client = Client::new(config).await?;

    client.spawn_retry_worker();
    client.spawn_listener(
        |msg| println!("Control: {} from {}", msg.action, msg.sender_ss58),
        Some(|sender, filename, path, size| {
            println!("Data: {} ({} bytes) from {}", filename, size, sender);
        }),
    );

    // Upload via Sync-Engine
    let hash = client
        .send_file_unencrypted_to_store("5FHneW46...", "./weights.safetensors")
        .await?;
    println!("Hash: {hash}");

    Ok(())
}

Configuration

Create a hermes_config.json:

{
    "node_secret_key_path": "/etc/hermes/iroh.key",
    "ss58_address": "5GrwvaEF5zXb26Fz9rcQpDWS57CtERHpNehXCPcNoHGKutQY",
    "api_token": "your-hippius-api-token",
    "storage_directory": "/var/hermes",
    "subnet_ids": [42]
}

Optional fields with defaults:

• rpc_url — Substrate RPC endpoint (default: wss://rpc.hippius.network:443)
• sync_engine_url — Sync-Engine base URL (default: https://hippius.store)
• subnet_ids — Subnet netuids to accept traffic from (default: [])

Architecture

See hippius-hermes.md for the full architecture specification.

Development

# Rust core
cargo build
cargo test
cargo clippy

# Python bindings
cd crates/python
pip install maturin
maturin develop --release

License

MIT