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Your questions are answered in TFA, including multiple links to documentation about the process.

https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/relay \

sibling comment with links to docs is the more accurate, but to summarize, it's some of both:

* all connections are always e2ee (even when traffic flows through a relay)

* relays are both for connection negotiation, and as a fallback when a direct connection isn't possible

* initial packet is always sent through the relay to keep a fast time-to-first-byte, while a direct connection is negotiated in parallel. typical connections send a few hundred bytes over the relay & the rest of the connection lifetime is direct

tl;dr: resolving ids to destinations requires a third party relay

relays _can_ be used to resolve IDs, but so can mDNS, an email or any other form of third party channel

the use case here is somebody opens a web browser and types/pastes an ID into the top bar -- and it needs to resolve, correctly, without prior knowledge, in roughly the same amount of time that DNS takes today

relays are the only thing among the things you listed that even have a chance of solving this problem