In response to the slow advancement of IPv6, industry insiders recently submitted a draft of the IPv8 core protocol to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The protocol will be 100% backward compatible with the IPv4 protocol, and all existing equipment will be seamlessly compatible with the IPv8 protocol without the need to update.
At present, the coverage speed of IPv6 has been significantly improved in many emerging markets. However, judging from the development history of IPv6, the progress of the protocol can be said to be at a snail's pace: it began to be discussed in 1992, gradually standardized in 1996, and was not officially released until December 1998.
Until now, the market coverage of IPv6 has just exceeded 50% (referenced by Google search data). The development of the global Internet is restricted by the shortage of IPv4 addresses. The slow advancement of the IPv6 protocol cannot solve practical problems. Therefore, many networks currently use CGNAT technology for IP sharing.
The core highlight of the IPv8 protocol is backward compatibility:
The IPv8 protocol is directly and 100% backward compatible with the IPv4 protocol from the design. The draft also clearly stipulates that IPv4 is a true subset of IPv8. According to the definition of the draft, IPv8 uses a 64-bit address space in the format r.r.r.r.n.n.n.n. This format consists of a 32-bit ASN routing prefix and a 32-bit host address.
When the 32-bit ASN routing prefix field (r.r.r.r.) is 0.0.0.0, this address is processed directly according to standard IPv4 rules, for example, 0.0.0.0.192.168.1.1 is equivalent to 192.168.1.1, so all existing devices that support the IPv4 protocol can support IPv8.
The operating system and applications can be directly compatible from IPv4 to IPv8 without making major changes. For the entire industry, this can reduce friction and costs in the upgrade process, allowing the industry to upgrade the IPv8 protocol with confidence.
There are only 184.4 billion IPv8 addresses:
Compared with the IPv6 protocol, which allows every grain of sand on the earth to have its own IP address (there are 34 billion trillion addresses), the IPv8 protocol cannot do this because the theoretical maximum number of independent addresses in the 64-bit address space of the IPv8 protocol is 2^64 (about 184.4 billion).
Each autonomous system (ASN) holder has access to approximately 4.29 billion host addresses, allowing organizations to scale without relying on CGNAT technology, which is used to address the shortage of IPv4 addresses.
The IPv8 protocol draft also stipulates that the BGP8 routing table is bound in units of ASN, and combined with the /16 minimization prefix principle, it can effectively suppress the expansion of the routing table, thereby reducing the processing pressure of the core router.
The security and management platform are also highlights:
The IPv8 protocol reconstructs the network management and security system and solves the fragmented management problem of traditional network services through a unified management platform for regional servers, integrating DHCP8 address allocation, DNS8 domain name resolution, NTP8 time synchronization, OAuth2 JWT identity authentication, NetLog8 network telemetry, WHOIS8 routing verification and many other services.
The IPv8 protocol also adopts preset distrust logic. All data packets transmitted to the Internet must undergo double verification of DNS8 resolution and WHOIS8 routing registration at the egress route. The device must hold a legal authentication token to communicate normally.
It should be noted that any individual or organization can submit a draft to the IETF for discussion. The draft published by the IETF does not represent the official IETF and has not been officially recognized and adopted by the IETF. After the IETF releases the draft, it is only for industry discussion.
The deadline for discussion of the IPv8 protocol draft is October 2026. Full text of the draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-thain-ipv8/