Gossip Protocol

A gossip protocol is the method blockchain nodes use to spread transactions and blocks across the network without any central coordinator. Each node forwards new information to a handful of connected peers, which forward it to their own peers, so a message reaches thousands of machines within seconds — much like a rumour spreading through a crowd. Bitcoin, Ethereum and most peer-to-peer systems rely on this design because it is resilient: there is no single distribution point to attack, and messages still propagate when many nodes drop offline. The trade-off is redundancy and latency — the same data arrives several times, and propagation delay influences things like orphaned blocks and how quickly a pending transaction shows up in the mempool.