Seems very similar to BitTorrent, but without trackers, with Content Defined Chunking (instead of Fixed Size Chunking) and utilizing Merkle trees + public key cryptography to enable append-only operations on shared data sets (rather than 'read-only once published').
In progress paper - https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/papers/dat-pa...
Dat protocol site - https://www.datprotocol.com/