A peer-to-peer (P2P) system is described herein which has a distributed hash table (DHT) overlay network containing multiple DHT nodes each of which has a complete distributed DHT hash table which contains information identifying a specific range of hashes for each of the DHT nodes such that when anyone of the DHT nodes receives a query asking for a specific key then the queried DHT node interacts with their respective DHT table to determine which one of the DHT nodes is storing the specific key and to forward ‘the query in one network hop to the particular DHT node which is storing the specific key. The P2P system can also implement one or more data-related mechanisms including a bootstrap mechanism, a replication mechanism, an update mechanism and a recover mechanism which enable fault-tolerant DHT nodes.