Mike's Protocol

The Gnutella2 peer-to-peer protocol is a reworking of the Gnutella protocol, written mainly by Michael Stokes. It drops all of the old Gnutella protocol except for the connection handshake and adopts an entirely new and complex system.

Gnutella2 uses UDP rather than TCP for searches, has an extensible binary XML-like packet format, and includes many extensions, such as intelligent query routing, SHA1 checksums, and parallel downloading in slices (swarming).

The draft specification for Gnutella2 was released on March 26, 2003, with Stokes' client Shareaza implementing full support. Since then, it has been adopted by the file-sharing programs Adagio, Gnucleus, Caribou, Morpheus, MLDonkey, and TrustyFiles.

Gnutella2 (G2) has not been adopted by some of the "old" Gnutella clients, due to political disputes between Michael Stokes and some Gnutella developers. These developers argued that Michael should have asked for the permission of their de facto Gnutella organization (the Gnutella Developers Forum) before giving his protocol the name of "Gnutella2". GDF members still refer to Gnutella2 as "MP" (Mike's Protocol).