Waku Monthly Update - January 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.
The Waku team had a strong start to 2025, making significant progress across multiple technical fronts and mapping out the development timeline for the year ahead.
Below are a few of the key highlights from Waku for January 2025.
Technical updates
Direct message reliability and protocol efficiency
In January, The Waku team made several improvements to the reliability of direct messages within the Status applications.
This included implementing a fix where Status Mobile messages were no longer received after switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data. Work continues on enhancing Waku’s light protocol implementations within the Status apps, with the goal of improving message throughput and reliability.
To learn more about Waku’s light protocols and edge node infrastructure, read our explainer blog post.
Over the last month, the Waku team has also continued to make progress on improving the overall efficiency of the p2p communication protocol.
We reduced the memory and storage usage of nwaku while implementing better log rotation and fixing various bugs, which included a SQLite issue affecting message storage.
Other maintenance improvements included capping maximum connections to improve stability and improving the REST API and RLN Sync to prevent syncing issues.
Nwaku in Status and scaling one-to-one chats
Work continued in January on integrating nwaku into the Status Desktop and Mobile applications.
The team improved nwaku’s handling of connection and topic changes in Status Desktop and made progress getting nwaku to work on Windows. We improved the integrability of waku-go-bindings, making it easier to implement in other applications.
Another highlight of the past month was successfully running Status Mobile integrated with nwaku on an Android emulator.
We continue to work on improving the reliability and efficiency of one-to-one chats in Status by implementing and refining a Rate-Limiting Nullifier (RLN) solution.
We are investigating what rate limit can be applied to the private chat protocols in order to protect the overall network and bandwidth of all users. Discussions have begun on how to present the rate limit's effects to end-users to ensure a solid user experience.
Ongoing development on Waku Store and RLN
The Waku team has continued work on Store v3, the next iteration of the Waku Store protocol that improves message storage and synchronisation.
Several fixes were deployed to the Store v3 protocol in line with feedback from previous versions.
Development of RLNv2 also remains a key focus, ensuring spam and denial-of-service (DoS) protection for Waku’s peer-to-peer network.
In January, we integrated the Anvil testing tool to improve RLN development, and work has begun on a new RLN smart contract that will support paid, multi-level memberships for spam protection.
Learn more about RLN and RLNaaS (RLN-as-a-Service) on the Waku network in our explainer article.
Defining our milestones for 2025
Last month, the Waku team began outlining its milestones for the year ahead, focusing on improving reliability and scalability across its peer-to-peer communications stack.
Currently defined milestones for the first half of 2025 are subject to change and include the following:
- Nwaku in Status Mobile MVP: Integrating nwaku in Status application on all platforms, including extending the scope to light mode and mobile. Use resulting nwaku-based Status apps for dogfooding to make nwaku the default Waku client in Status apps.
- Hardening and scaling foundations for private chats: Establishing a foundation for scaling one-to-one and private group chats to support a larger number of users. Additionally, we will harden the underlying protocols by studying and refining the current specifications, as well as isolating user traffic from other features.
- Waku Messaging API: Defining a Waku Messaging API with peer-to-peer reliability, migrating code from Golang to Nim, and ensuring a clear separation of concerns between Chat and Waku protocols. This includes using nwaku C-bindings to improve Rust bindings.
- Explore peer discovery gap: We aim to define requirements and implement a proof-of-concept for the decentralisation of store services and the implementation of a mixnet to upgrade peer discovery for Waku.
- Upgrade Waku for the web: Hardening Waku for browser environments, with js-waku as a client and nwaku as service node, to build robust and reliable web applications for Logos.
- Logos web apps: Develop web applications for Logos, including hardening Qaku for town halls and events and creating a proof-of-concept web forum through Waku to enable a decentralised Logos forum.
- RLN Mainnet: Rescoping and continuing development of RLN. This includes specifying economical behaviour, implementing RLN for light clients, as well as deploying the smart contract on mainnet.
For a full breakdown of Waku’s current state and development goals, read the project’s milestones and roadmap.
Waku powering Portrait micro-websites
January marked the official public beta launch of Portrait, a decentralised social platform built for the New Internet and powered by Waku. Portrait enables users to create, host, and manage micro-websites in a censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving manner.
Portrait operates on Waku’s P2P communications protocols, ensuring scalability and accessibility for resource-limited devices such as smartphones and browsers.
The Portrait mobile app is under development, while the current hosting node implementation runs as a standalone app on Mac. With the public beta now open, early adopters have the opportunity to reserve and create their Portrait for a $10 payment on the Base network.
The launch of Portrait showcases Waku’s capabilities in powering real-world decentralised applications, reinforcing its role as a foundational protocol for applications building on peer-to-peer infrastructure.
Read our blog post to learn more about how Portrait uses Waku as the foundational infrastructure of its decentralised micro-websites.
Upcoming events
As we venture further into 2025, the Waku team is actively planning its participation in key industry events to share insights on private, censorship-resistant communications.
While no dates are confirmed yet, expect to see Waku at major conferences and meetups throughout the year. Stay tuned to our socials for announcements on where we’ll be next!
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