Waku - 2024 Year in Review
It has been a productive year for Waku, with significant progress made across the development and adoption of the protocol.
Against the backdrop of an increasingly restrictive and surveilled digital world, decentralised and censorship-resistant communications are more critical than ever for realising digital sovereignty and safeguarding user privacy.
Over the past year, we have continued to research and build out the Waku protocol in pursuit of this goal, and we have seen exciting use cases arise as interest in peer-to-peer comms grows in the blockchain community and beyond.
Let’s take a look at the highlights from Waku in 2024.
Ongoing protocol development
The development roadmap for the past year picked up on the heels of the release of the Waku network MVP in December 2023.
Early in the year, we published a technical overview of the Waku network that outlines its core components and conveys how they work together to deliver a reliable and scalable p2p communications network.
This year, the team made significant strides in improving the protocol's reliability and durability while exploring how to expand the network to work on more devices. A key highlight was developing an improved rate-limiting system, RLNv2, which makes the network more resilient to DoS attacks and spam.
Economics for RLN membership have been defined and the smart contract has been updated accordingly, marking the first implementation of RLN memberships having a requisite price and behaviour.
We also improved the usability of edge nodes (light clients), reducing their hardware and bandwidth requirements and enabling them to run on more devices. These protocols are integrated within the Status Mobile app, which is now capable of running in “light mode” and consumes much less bandwidth than previous versions.
In 2024, the team made significant progress on various vital milestones, including continued efforts to improve the performance and stability of the Waku Store protocol, as well as improving the reliability of the Status messaging functionalities over Waku.
This year, Waku lead Franck Royer also began publishing Explanation Series articles detailing certain features of the Waku protocol and the challenges they aim to solve. You can learn more about the various elements of Waku’s protocol design in the following articles:
Nwaku in Status Desktop and end-to-end reliability
In addition to working on protocol elements, Waku has also made good progress integrating nwaku, the reference implementation of the Waku protocol written in Nim, into the Status desktop application.
Status Desktop currently runs on an implementation of Waku written in Go, and migrating this to nwaku will help unify Waku across platforms and reduce maintenance costs. This is done by exposing C-bindings, effectively enabling the integration of Waku in most languages.
Over the past year, the Waku team has also been designing an end-to-end message reliability protocol called Scalable Data Sync, or SDS. This protocol aims to significantly improve message reliability in Status, specifically in the context of Communities.We have also proceeded with making Status chat protocols testable at the library level, allowing bugs and issues to be found before app testing by running a suite of tests in a controlled network environment where we can simulate instability.Read more about Waku’s research on permissionless community creation.
Powering decentralised applications
As a core component of the Logos tech stack, Waku’s development aligns with the Logos vision to create next-generation public goods and governance models that confer greater freedom, transparency, and stability to their citizens through voluntary participation.
In 2024, Waku provided the foundational communications infrastructure for several projects in the blockchain industry that share this approach to digital sovereignty.
The Graph, a decentralised protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data, leverages the Waku protocol to power its Graphcast gossip network for indexers. Using Waku, Graphcast allows indexers to synchronise data over a peer-to-peer network, removing the reliance on centralised platforms to align with the principles of censorship resistance and decentralisation shared by both projects.
Read our blog post about Waku’s integration with The Graph for more info.
We also highlighted another project that leveraged Waku this past year – RAILGUN.
RAILGUN uses the Waku protocol to power a privacy-preserving transaction layer for EVM networks. Thanks to RAILGUN’s zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography, users can transact on a blockchain while remaining anonymous and private.
Learn more about how RAILGUN uses Waku to power private transactions.
Events
Waku’s calendar was packed this past year, with team members travelling worldwide to share protocol development updates and work on integrations with aligned projects in the Web3 industry.
The biggest event on the Waku calendar this past year was Devcon 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand, where team members hosted several presentations, including keynote speeches and workshops.
Check out Waku’s presentations at Devcon 2024 below:
- Bringing peer-to-peer networks to ALL the peers
- RLNv2: enhanced spam protection for all peer-to-peer networks
- Permissionless P2P with The Waku Network
During Devcon week, Franck, Hanno, and Simon-Pierre hosted a keynote presentation at Libp2p Day on making peer-to-peer networks reliable through Waku’s family of modular protocols. Waku’s Václav Pavlín also hosted a workshop at the Intents & Chain Abstraction Summit.
We also had a booth at the Devcon Impact Forum, a great way to interact with others in the Ethereum community interested in integrating a scalable and resilient peer-to-peer communications network.
Waku hosted sessions at the Parallel Society Congress, an event held by Logos that explored the possibility of network states enabled by a fully decentralised technology stack. Franck Royer and Rachel-Rose O'Leary presented a session on “Parallel Society Tech: The State of the Art and Future”, and Václav provided a live demo of the Qaku app at the event.
Václav also gave a live demo of Qaku at Codex’s Decentralised Data Summit, where Franck Royer hosted a panel discussion on the future of privacy in Web3.
For more information on Waku at Devcon 2024 and adjacent events, read our monthly update for November.
In addition to our participation in these marquee events, Waku was also present at many Ethereum ecosystem events throughout the past year, with team members representing the project at ETHBelgrade, ETHDenver, ETHLatam, ETHRome, ETHDam, and many more.
As we head into 2025, we are focused on delivering on the goals outlined in our roadmap, which includes improving the capabilities and expanding the functionality of the Waku protocol while bringing peer-to-peer communications to more devices.
We are also excited to see Waku adopted by more projects in the Web3 ecosystem that share our goals of preserving user privacy and safeguarding against censorship.
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