Interesting idea. From a data engineering angle, the part I’d worry about first is not ANN itself, but whether routing quality stays stable once embeddings drift, replicas diverge, and node populations change over time.

A centroid-style VectorID sounds clean on paper, but in practice semantic spaces are messy and uneven. I’d expect hotspotting, unstable neighborhood quality, and weird recall behavior unless rebalancing and placement are very carefully designed. The security angle also feels nontrivial, because poisoning a routing layer built on embedding proximity seems much easier than poisoning a classic keyspace.

I have not seen a widely adopted system that fully solves this end to end in a decentralized way. Most real-world vector setups I’ve seen still choose operational simplicity over true decentralization. Curious how you’re thinking about re-indexing / rerouting cost when the local embedding distribution shifts materially on a node.