Why Nylon?

Nylon is a self-healing WireGuard mesh that routes around failures. If a link goes down, nylon reroutes traffic through the next-best path in seconds. No manual intervention, no central coordination servers.

Under the hood, nylon implements the Babel routing protocol (RFC 8966) on top of a modified wireguard-go, using measured latency as the routing metric.

Main Features

• Multi-hop Routing: Traffic flows through the lowest-latency path across your mesh. Unlike Tailscale, Nebula, or ZeroTier, nodes don’t need to be directly reachable from each other. Nylon forwards through intermediate hops automatically.
• No Coordination Server: No SaaS dependency, no single control-plane. Nodes exchange routes directly over the same WireGuard tunnel that carries your data.
• Single Binary, Single Port: One statically-linked binary, one UDP port (57175), one YAML config. That’s it.
• WireGuard Client Compatibility: Connect stock WireGuard clients (iOS, Android, Windows) to the mesh with zero extra software. Mobile clients roam between gateways seamlessly.

Comparison

Feature	nylon	Tailscale	Nebula	DIY WG+Babel
Topology	Partial mesh: nodes forward for each other	Full mesh (every pair needs a tunnel)	Full mesh	Partial mesh (manual setup)
Routing	Latency-aware, automatic multi-hop	No routing (relay only, no optimization)	No routing	Yes (depends on daemon)
Self-healing	Yes, reroutes in <10s	Relies on coordination server	No automatic failover	Yes (depends on daemon)
Coordination	None required (fully in-band)	Centralized (SaaS/Headscale)	Lighthouse servers	Manual (out-of-band protocol)
WireGuard Clients	Stock iOS/Android/Windows clients work	Tailscale client only	Nebula client only	Manual configuration
NAT Traversal	Port forward or public relay node	STUN/ICE/DERP (best-in-class)	Public lighthouse nodes	Manual
Configuration	Central YAML file	Web Dashboard / SSO	Certificates & CA	Multiple configs + network namespaces
License	Apache 2.0	Proprietary SaaS / BSD-3 client	MIT	Various

Encryption Model

Nylon uses WireGuard’s encryption hop-by-hop, not end-to-end. Each link between adjacent nodes is encrypted, but intermediate nodes decrypt and re-encrypt forwarded traffic. This is the same model as DIY WireGuard+Babel setups. If you need end-to-end encryption between every pair of nodes, Tailscale or Nebula may be a better fit.

When to use nylon

• Distributed edge nodes: Build low-latency anycast networks for geographically distributed services that adapt to changing conditions.
• Home lab networking: Connect home devices, servers, and cloud resources into a single resilient network.
• Sovereign networks: Fully independent mesh that works in isolated or air-gapped environments. No “phone-home” requirement.
• Optimized routing: Automatically use the lowest-latency path without manual configuration changes.

Nylon vs. DIY WireGuard+Babel

If you’ve ever tried to build a dynamic network using WireGuard + Babel (or BGP), you know how powerful it can be, but also how painful it is to maintain.

The typical setup involves running separate WireGuard interfaces for every peering arrangement, along with a routing daemon to manage dynamic routing. This gives you a powerful, self-healing network, but it’s cumbersome to set up and maintain.

Nylon is that powerful DIY stack refined into a single, opinionated binary. It automates the tedious parts, giving you the resilience of a professional routing setup with the ease of a modern VPN.