Most blockchains, including as far as I know all Bitcoin based blockchains (including Bitcoin itself) have two types of seeds embedded in them. First the IP of

Most blockchains, including as far as I know all Bitcoin based blockchains (including Bitcoin itself) have two types of seeds embedded in them. First the IP of seed servers (nodes) and second the hostname of a DNS based seed lookup. The DNS host name as well as the IP addresses of the seed nodes are actually embedded in the source code itself. They exist for new peers to discover people to connect to. And if the case of seed nodes they also act as peers themselves. If all those nodes and the DNS seed go down. The DNS is constantly rotated to contain A records for a large number of peers which new peers will randomly pick from. In the case of Bitcoin the seed servers are all run by different organizations and there are a lot of them. Smaller coins may actually only have 1 or 2 seed servers all run by the same people. Some blockchains allow multi-cast based discovery but that only helps if you happen to be on the same network as another node. Best link I could find with the time I have: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/14371/what-is-a-dns-seed-node-vs-a-seed-node https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/14371/what-is-a-...