Is there really no server?

A lightweight registry handles discovery; once agents find each other, data flows directly peer-to-peer. Peers behind symmetric NAT that cannot hole-punch fall back to an encrypted beacon relay.

How does NAT traversal work?

Three tiers: STUN discovery for full-cone, UDP hole-punching for restricted-cone, and automatic relay fallback for symmetric NAT.

What encryption is used?

X25519 Diffie-Hellman key exchange with AES-256-GCM authenticated encryption. Every tunnel is encrypted by default.

For · P2P

Direct peer-to-peer for AI agents.

Direct peer-to-peer data path. No API gateway. No message broker. A thin registry handles discovery — then agents connect directly, encrypted, NAT-traversing, zero config.

Install in one line → Read the architecture

Why direct

Hub-and-spoke is a bottleneck.

Latency

Zero-hop data path

On a direct path, packets travel the exact network RTT between the two machines — no gateway, no broker queue sitting in between adding tens of milliseconds. Symmetric-NAT peers that cannot hole-punch fall back to an encrypted relay, which adds a hop.

Security

End-to-end encrypted

X25519 key exchange, AES-256-GCM authenticated encryption, on by default (disable with --no-encrypt if you must). Nothing in the middle can read your data.

Ops

No servers to run

No message broker to scale. No gateway fleet to patch. The only service you run is the daemon on each agent machine — discovery and NAT traversal use the Pilot-operated registry and beacon.

Scale

Linear by construction

Each new peer adds one tunnel to whoever it talks to. There is no central fan-in limit. The network grows with the agents, not around them.

The numbers

No middleman, no middleman overhead.

Latency

≈ RTT

A direct tunnel adds little over the raw network round-trip between the two peers.

LAN

Low

Same-subnet agents talk at LAN latency — Pilot stays out of the way.

Loss

Low

The userspace reliability layer recovers lost UDP packets; measure your own path with pilotctl bench.

Header

34 bytes

Per-packet header (flow-control window + CRC32). Encryption adds a small separate envelope (nonce + GCM tag).

Any NAT

Three tiers of traversal.

Full-cone NAT

STUN discovers your public endpoint. The peer dials it directly. No punch needed. Works across most consumer and cloud NAT.

Restricted cone NAT

The rendezvous coordinates a simultaneous hole-punch on both sides. The first outbound packet opens the return path, typically establishing quickly.

Symmetric NAT

Hole-punching impossible. Pilot auto-falls-back to an encrypted relay. The relay forwards opaque packets - it cannot read your data.

Up and running

Four steps.
About a minute.

agent@node ~ direct p2p

0.8s

# agent A - install and start

$ curl -fsSL https://pilotprotocol.network/install.sh | sh

$ pilotctl daemon start --hostname agent-a

Daemon running (pid 24817)

Address: 0:0000.A91F.7C2E

Hostname: agent-a

# agent B - handshake then dial agent A directly

$ pilotctl handshake agent-a

$ pilotctl connect agent-a --message "hello, peer"

✓ direct tunnel · 34ms · no relay

No Docker. No Kubernetes. No YAML. Just a binary and a hostname.

01
Install
One command. Static binaries (daemon + CLI), no dependencies.
02
Start the daemon
Gets a permanent address. Joins the network. NAT traversal is automatic.
03
Trust
Mutual handshake before any connection. You decide who can reach you.
04
Dial
Connect by hostname. Direct tunnel, encrypted end-to-end.

Direct peer-to-peer for AI agents.

Hub-and-spoke is a bottleneck.

No middleman, no middleman overhead.

Three tiers of traversal.

Four steps.About a minute.

Go direct. Peer-to-peer by default.

Four steps.
About a minute.