Key Highlights from the Waku Virtual Offsite
Waku recently held an in-depth virtual offsite, covering a range of issues to help the team align on protocol development and ensure that contributors had well-defined and clear goals for the future of the tech stack.
Each session of the virtual offsite event was live-streamed and posted on the Waku YouTube channel, touching on everything from ways to streamline developer documentation to evaluating models for a service inventivisation marketplace.
In the weeks since the offsite, the Waku team has been publishing key learnings from these sessions on the Vac forum, where further discussion on each topic can occur among internal and external contributors.
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If you are looking for an overview of what happened during the event, we have summarised the key learnings from each session of the Waku virtual offsite below.
Defining Waku’s vision, mission, and principles
One of the most important takeaways from the Waku virtual offsite was the communal drafting of a vision and mission statement for the project, along with defining the principles that underlie its design.
As a core component of the Logos tech stack, it is important that Waku have clearly defined principles that align with those of Logos and help drive its development in a way that contributes towards a larger mission of enabling digital sovereignty and upgrading human governance.
From this offsite session, Waku defined the following mission and vision statements:
Vision: A world where freedom of expression and privacy are guaranteed for anybody, anywhere.
Mission: Build decentralised protocols that enable private communication and interactions.
The team also proposed three underlying principles for Waku’s development: a focus on open collaboration and development; a robust process for sharing ideas through specifications; and an approach to development and performance monitoring that focuses on building understanding and enabling learning.
Read the full discussion on the Vac forum.
The future of RLN adoption
RLN (Rate-Limiting Nullifer) adoption was another important topic discussed during the Waku virtual offsite.
The team provided a brief overview of Waku’s RLN implementation to ensure all contributors understood how it is leveraged for DoS protection on the Waku network.
Contributors explored and outlined the current state of RLN on Waku, which includes the deployment of membership contracts on the Linea Sepolia testnet, before refining an action plan for taking RLN to mainnet.
The main obstacle to RLN adoption was identified as how to make it as frictionless as possible for legitimate users to receive sufficient memberships without allowing the RLN membership system itself to fall victim to spam or DoS attacks.
Proposed solutions to this problem included developing a library that allows third parties to perform stealth commitments or creating a contract that allows RLN registration for Karma holders on Status Network.
Contributors also went over the roadmapped plan for bringing RLN to mainnet, as well as several possible ways to future-proof the protocol.
Read the full discussion on the Vac forum.
Improving Waku docs
The capacity for new developers to contribute to Waku is dependent largely on the project’s documentation.
A major topic of discussion during the offsite was how to improve the project’s overall documentation to make it more accessible to new contributors and open-source developers.
The team identified several issues with Waku’s current documentation implementation and proposed a number of significant improvements to better align the project’s documentation with its goals and the spirit of open-source development.
A new structure for Waku’s documentation was proposed to make onboarding easier and more straightforward by adding a landing page with a concise overview of the protocol stack.
Changes were also proposed to make the documentation required for integrating Waku into a project more easily accessible to projects considering Waku for their p2p comms implementation.
A three-stage roadmap for improving Waku’s developer documentation was defined, beginning with an audit of the existing documentation structure before implementing an MVP of the new proposed structure.
Read the full discussion on the Vac forum.
Waku API architecture
During the virtual offsite, Waku contributors noted that adoption of the protocol stack is limited due in part to a lack of readily accessible APIs that developers can use to easily plug Waku-powered comms solutions into their projects.
The team proposed a revision to Waku’s API architecture to address this problem - arguing that each of Waku’s available APIs should be split into one of three categories: Waku Core, Waku APIs, and App APIs.
Waku Core APIs are related to internal development with implementations close to specifications and RFCs, while Waku APIs are public-facing APIs that expose elements of the protocol stack relevant to outside consumers, including Send and Receive functionality.
The proposed Waku App API category will include higher-order functionality that is easily accessible to projects and developers who want to simply and easily integrate Waku into their applications. This includes APIs like the planned Chat API, which aims to offer a simple way to integrate Waku-powered p2p chat into an application.
Read the full discussion on the Vac forum.
Service marketplace and incentivisation
The Waku virtual offsite saw continued and evolving discussion around how to incentivise the provision of services on the Waku network.
Contributors discussed possible authorisation models related to the provision of light protocol functionality by nodes and considered how this could be implemented alongside the existing light protocol architecture and RLN implementation.
The team also discussed the viability of micropayments for incentivisation, noting that integrations with Status Network are possible to enable gasless transactions to facilitate this model.
Discussions are ongoing around how micropayments can be implemented and how possible authentication regimes could be applied to edge nodes.
Read the full discussion on the Vac forum.
Building a FOSS developer community
In line with Waku’s efforts to improve collaboration and attract open-source developers, contributors at the offsite examined the challenges involved in building a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developer community.
Looking ahead, the team noted that Waku needs to implement low-cost, effective strategies for creating and coordinating community involvement in developing the protocol stack.
Proposed solutions to the challenge of expanding Waku’s contributor pool included the introduction of GitHub metrics tracking to incentivise meaningful contributions and expose good first issues to new developers.
The team also proposed sharing and engaging with positive contributions from internal and external contributors, as well as leveraging comms and internal resources to amplify the positive developments and open issues within the Waku ecosystem.
Read the full discussion on the Vac forum.
Waku web app development
Another exciting topic of discussion at the Waku virtual offsite was the state and direction of Waku web app development, creating test cases that leverage the value of Waku as a browser-based and decentralised alternative for web app backends.
Contributors discussed the plans for Waku web apps going forward, which included creating more applications to trial new use cases, documenting architectural patterns that can be used to integrate Waku across different applications easily, and maintaining existing apps to align with Waku updates.
Web apps built on Waku were also identified as a promising area for sourcing contributions from external contributors, which is in line with the project's open-source development strategy.
The team considered creating more content aimed at external developers and performing more outreach to attract like-minded newcomers to start building apps with Waku.
Read the full discussion on the Vac forum.
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