Waku Monthly Update - June 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.
If you want to get involved with Waku or integrate reliable, privacy preserving p2p comms with your project, read through our documentation and join our Discord to get started.
It has been an exciting and productive month for the Waku team. We held an in-depth virtual offsite covering everything from RLN adoption to web apps and made steady progress on development across the modular p2p communications stack.
Below are the highlights from Waku for June 2025.
Technical updates
RLN readiness and integration
June saw solid progress in preparing RLN (Rate-Limiting Nullifier) for mainnet. All RLN tests in nwaku now pass with the updated contract architecture, marking a major milestone. The team finalised ABI changes to support multilevel membership, though a key decision on credential encoding format (Big vs Little Endian) remains open.
Work on the RLNv2 web interface continued, with efforts focused on resolving edge cases where certain credential values (idCommitmentBigInt) are rejected. Compatibility improvements are underway to ensure a smoother user experience.
Status Desktop, Nwaku, and Chat SDK
Nwaku integration into Status Desktop advanced significantly, with new keepalive mechanisms, improved network disconnection detection, and expanded configuration options. libwaku metrics retrieval is now functional, and Windows support was strengthened with DLL compatibility and improved C library safety.
Foundational work to scale private chats progressed, including shard info metrics for better observability. The Chat SDK also took shape, with early prototypes for SDS payload handling and rate limiting, as well as improvements to the segmentation library.
General maintenance included dynamic log level support in nwaku, dependency upgrades, and preparation for the 0.36.0 release.
A new version of js-waku was released, featuring upgrades to libp2p, TypeScript 5.8, and Node.js 22, along with peer-exchange being enabled by default.
Waku web apps, API improvements, and message reliability
Browser-based Waku saw continued improvements with synchronous SDS message handling, improved peer selection for Store operations, and a more robust connection management system.
Core libraries were updated to keep pace with the wider ecosystem. Simulation testing is pending further feedback.
Waku API improvements focused on smarter peer selection, better protocol enforcement, and preparation for the Messaging Storage API.
Elsewhere, moderation features were added to OpChan, Trollbox was brought closer to production, and SDS integration was scoped.
Peer discovery specs were updated, and progress continued on Waku node incentivisation via proof-of-payment testing in Lightpush.
Waku virtual offsite
Waku held an in-depth virtual offsite, covering a range of issues to align the team on protocol development and towards outcomes that deliver measurable results.
Each session was live-streamed and posted on the Waku YouTube channel, from how we are looking at streamlining our documentation to onboard new developers to the models we are considering for a service incentivisation marketplace.
If you’re interested in learning more about the key takeaways from the Waku virtual offsite, you can head over to the Vac forum to learn more and participate in open discussions about the development of Waku and related projects.
We’ll be sharing more about the key takeaways from our virtual offsite soon - stay tuned to our socials!
Waku powers W3PN Hacks winners
From June 13–15, 2025, the W3PN Hacks hackathon in Berlin brought together a global mix of builders to create tools that help defend civil liberties, resist surveillance, protect privacy, and bolster digital freedom.
Waku has powered several projects at the event, with a number of the winners running on Waku or supporting integration with our p2p comms stack.
For a deeper look at the winners of W3PN Hacks that support integration with Waku, read our blog post.
Integrating Waku with TACo and Codex
In June, we also explored how Waku can be integrated with Threshold Access Control (TACo) and Codex, the Data Durability Engine and distributed storage network that underpins the Logos tech stack, together with Waku and Nomos.
TACo provides a distributed architecture for secure cryptographic operations and decentralised access control.
By integrating Waku protocols with TACo, we can provide a distributed, scalable peer-to-peer messaging layer that ensures message security without introducing reliance on third-party centralised services.
Read more about how TACo and Codex can be integrated with Waku, and how this is demonstrated in the Cyphershare file-sharing app, on the Waku blog.
Understanding Chat SDK motivations and requirements
This past month also saw extensive discussion within the Waku team around the topic of creating and deploying Chat SDK for easy integration of the Waku stack.
Chat SDK should offer a powerful and accessible toolset for developers that lets them easily integrate Waku’s p2p comms capabilities into their applications.
The Vac forum hosted lively discussions on the topic this past month, with the community discussing the motivations behind the SDK, how it could be implemented, and integrating RLN with the SDK.
Exploring zero-knowledge as a design philosophy
In June, the Waku team also published a blog post that explored the concept of zero-knowledge beyond its standard application in cryptography.
We considered Vitalik Buterin’s position on ‘control as liability’ and offered an approach to architecture based on ephemerality that yields so-called ‘zero-knowledge properties’by design.
This concept of zero-knowledge architecture refers to a system design approach where service providers cannot access user data or derive meaningful insights from the transactions they facilitate.
To explore more about this concept, read our full blog post on the topic.
Upcoming events
In June, the Waku team headed to Protocol Berg in Berlin, where Sergei gave a presentation on 12 June about Waku’s decentralised marketplace and infrastructure for dapps.
We also attended a Web3Privacy Now hackathon hosted alongside this event, which saw a number of apps experimenting with Waku for their p2p comms solution.
June saw Waku’s Václav head to DevConf in Brno, where he spoke about decentralising dev tools and AI agents. He also contributed to the Logos Circles Brno meetup held alongside the event.
Václav headed to ETHCluj from June 26-28, held at the Cluj-Napoca Technical University Hub in Romania, where he spoke about non-blockchain web3 infrastructure and how Logos is building the tools for a sovereign internet.
A busy June was rounded off by EthCC in Cannes, France from 30 June - 3 July, where Waku’s Danish hosted a technical workshop on the Waku tech stack and Sasha delivered a presentation.
Follow our socials for the latest news from the Waku team and announcements on where we’ll be heading next.
Subscribe to the Waku newsletter to get the latest updates directly in your inbox.