Waku Monthly Update - February 2025
Every month, we’ll bring you the latest highlights and progress from the Waku team. To receive these updates directly in your inbox, consider subscribing to our newsletter.
February saw the Waku team make solid progress across several core milestones. The team also focussed on developing a proof-of-concept for incentivising infrastructure provision, as well as researching other integrations such as an implementation of mixnet into the Waku protocol.
Below are the highlights from Waku for February 2025.
Technical Updates
For a full breakdown of Waku’s current state and development goals, read the project’s milestones and roadmap.
Improving message and end-to-end reliability
The Waku team has continued to make steady progress in improving message reliability in Status Mobile and Desktop.
In February, the team published a new specification for p2p reliability in Waku, which addresses the dependability of message propagation and proposes several potential methods to improve reliability and mitigate message loss.
These measures are already implemented in Status applications and are now being formalised for future reference. They include increasing redundancy, implementing mechanisms to detect and prevent message loss, and leveraging the Waku Store protocol to improve the reliability of message propagation on the network.
The Waku team has continued to enhance the scalability and efficiency of one-to-one chats and application protocols. They have tackled performance improvements for Status Communities by reducing the number of content topics used by a Community. This should improve query time for old messages, as well as the time it takes to subscribe to new messages.
The changes are not yet available in the Status app, as the deployment needs to be phased to avoid breaking changes.
A number of optimisations and error-handling improvements have been made to the light push protocol for resource-constrained devices, and these will be implemented in lightpush v3.
Last month also saw the Waku team progress in the implementation of a Scalable Data Sync (SDS), an end-to-end reliability protocol for Status Communities. The library is near completion, with the final code review ongoing, and work has started to integrate it into Status Communities. You can learn more about the different types of reliability in Waku in this blog post.
Protocol scaling, Qaku, and nwaku in Status Desktop
Efforts to scale Waku’s Store Service have resulted in key bug fixes for the store synchronisation system, limited shard support for Waku Sync, and initial work towards full shard support with improved request time range functionality.
Work has also advanced on optimising Waku for web-based applications such as Qaku, and the app itself has received minor fixes ahead of further hardening and refinement.
Further work has been conducted on integrating nwaku within Status Desktop, which saw us execute Status Desktop running using nwaku bindings. The team is resolving crashes, adding enhanced error handling, and testing the integration across macOS and Linux platforms. Windows is next, as the team recently finalised the work to build nwaku on Windows systems.
Private chat security and scalability remain a priority, with documentation drafted on encryption within the Status application, along with detailed references for edge nodes and sharding functionality.
The foundation for Communities within Waku has also been strengthened with the publication of the initial sharding specification.
RLN and PoCs for incentivisation and mixnet
Significant progress has been made towards RLN (Rate-Limited Nullifier) deployment on mainnet. We published a forum post outlining multisignature suggestions for the RLN contract, while the JavaScript RLN library has been moved to the main repository.
On the js-waku side, additional enhancements include developing an improved peer management mechanism and reintegrating it with the light push protocols.
To encourage participation in Waku infrastructure, development has begun on a client-side reputation system to incentivise node operators. This proof-of-concept aims to experiment with ways to fund Waku infrastructure that services resource-constrained devices and is explained further in the section below on the Waku Service Marketplace.
The team has also been exploring the introduction of strong sender anonymity by starting on a PoC to integrate libp2p mix protocol in Waku.
Debugging and monitoring capabilities have been improved through enhanced metrics collection in Status, local infrastructure documentation, and early-stage planning for a local dashboard aligned with the project roadmap.
Ongoing maintenance efforts for this first half of 2025 have focused on improving interoperability across implementations, refining metrics accuracy, enhancing REST API error handling, and more.
A look at the Waku Service Marketplace
This last month, the Waku team has worked on researching mechanisms for funding infrastructure that serves resource-constrained devices.
The backbone of the Waku protocol can function on a tit-for-tat model, where malicious or selfish nodes are dropped in favour of competent nodes. However, this model doesn’t apply to light clients or edge nodes, which are resource-constrained devices like smartphones and browsers that interact with the Waku network.
These devices rely on the service of relay nodes and other core infrastructure components but do not contribute to the network in turn.
Therefore, for Waku to accommodate these devices, a decentralised and sustainable incentivisation scheme is needed.
Waku Lead Franck Royer recently published an in-depth post on the Waku blog as part of the Explainer Series, which outlines the concept of the Waku Service Marketplace for addressing this need for incentivisation.
ETHDenver 2025 and upcoming events
Waku was well represented at ETHDenver 2025, with Business Development Lead Pedro and Program Manager Aaron both attending the event.
They connected with like-minded developers and community members and traded insights around the mission to build scalable and reliable p2p communications for the decentralised internet.
The year is just getting started, and we’re excited to attend key industry events throughout 2025.
If you want to keep up to date with where to find the Waku team, stay tuned to our socials for the latest announcements on where we’ll be heading next.
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