Waku Monthly Update - March 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.

March was a busy month for the Waku team. Highlights included a new release for js-waku (the JavaScript implementation of Waku) that brought several important improvements and an internal hackathon where Waku developers explored exciting new use cases for Waku.

The team continued to progress across several major milestones and held in-depth discussions on the development direction of user-facing APIs and possible solutions for incentivising service provision on the network.

Below are the highlights from Waku for March 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 been making steady headway in improving message and end-to-end reliability in Status Mobile and Desktop.

In March, the team continued to work on integrating the reliability manager into the Status apps, debugging various issues and resolving connectivity problems, particularly with callbacks.

The team has also begun developing and implementing global sharding for Communities to improve message scaling.

Lightpush v3 has now been implemented, which introduces a number of optimisations and error-handling improvements to the light push protocol for resource-constrained devices.

We have also continued work on hardening and scaling the foundations for private chats, which involves specifying a private chat protocol. The team completed a high-level description of one-to-one message flows and a small related proof-of-concept. We also documented security assumptions within the existing privacy model and the findings from the proof-of-concept chat SDK.

JS-Waku, Logos web apps, and nwaku in Status Desktop

March saw the latest release of js-waku, which includes several major improvements to the web-compatible implementation of the Waku protocol. These include integrating a health indicator and the newest version of Light Push, as well as standardising peer IDs and making several stability improvements.

Work has continued in earnest on the hardening of Qaku, the Q&A web app powered by Waku. The team is currently working on integrating the Qaku library into a new frontend for the application, after which it could be deployed for Q&A functionality during events such as the IFT Town Hall.

Regarding the implementation of Scalable Data Sync in browsers, periodic maintenance tasks for incoming and outgoing buffers were implemented, along with logic for sending and receiving sync messages.The team made good progress on integrating nwaku within Status Desktop last month. Multiple fixes and improvements were made, and updates were made to Waku’s Go bindings to enable automatic updates.

On Windows, the nwaku setup process was simplified, configuration fine-tuned, and documentation improved.

RLN and raw specification for Waku Mix

The team has continued to explore the introduction of improving sender anonymity by integrating the libp2p mix protocol in Waku. This resulted in the publication of a raw specification for Waku Mix, which outlines the scope of this project and how mix could be integrated with the store and lightpush protocols.

Work on the Rate-Limiting Nullifier (RLN) smart contract for paid, multi-level memberships progressed with ongoing updates to RLN contract tests and registration tools in nwaku. The scope of work and registration steps for the new contract were further clarified.

The RLNv2 web management interface was migrated to the RLNv2 contract. A web app for wallet authentication and connection was implemented, and the first part of the RLNv2 membership registration flow was developed.The team also focused on creating a proof-of-concept incentive system for pay-for-RLN provision. Parts of the client-side reputation system were merged, and the integration of a proof-of-concept reputation system with lightpush was initiated.

Internal hackathon and demos

In March, the Waku team held an internal hackathon. During the event, developers experimented with the tech stack and various use cases, after which they demonstrated their Waku-based applications to the wider team.

The hackathon was a great success, with the team producing productive and insightful outcomes which will help to drive the development of the Waku protocol family going forward.

A few of the projects created during the hackathon are promising early versions of standalone applications with real-world use cases that the team plans to build out and make available as products for public use.

Take a look at the projects demonstrated during the Waku internal hackathon below:

• Waku Wallet Connect
• WhisperBox MVP
• Waku Phone
• Passkey for RLN
• Waku Remote
• WNS (Waku Name Service)

Examining incentives and the Waku Service Marketplace

A major topic for the Waku team last month was the incentivisation of services on the Waku network and how this could be accomplished while preserving decentralisation and privacy.

The most recent Explainer Series post by Waku lead Franck Royer delves into the concept of a Waku Service Marketplace, which could achieve the incentivisation needed for edge nodes such as browsers and smartphones to operate trustlessly on the network.

Read the full Explainer Series article here.

Discussion around creating a service marketplace for Waku took place on the Vac forum, where Franck Royer outlined the case for financial incentivisation on the network and fielded questions and ideas from peers to refine the team’s research.

Last month, Franck also clarified the position of RLN and the currently proposed pay-for-RLN membership, noting that ideally, there would be a method of onboarding new members to the network that introduced less friction.

In a recent Vac forum post, he outlined that this approach could be subsidised and remains an initial implementation; it is expected that other methods of RLN provision will be trialled as its application progresses.

Another insightful discussion around Waku from the Vac forum was a proposal to omit the Waku store protocol from the Messaging API. This would ensure that Waku remains scalable, performant, and reliable as more projects begin to integrate the network through these interfaces.

Read the full forum post.

Upcoming events

Waku had a great presence at ETHDenver in February, and we're looking forward to attending more major industry events throughout 2025!

The team aims to attend several events in the coming months. Waku protocol research engineer Sergei will be presenting at Protocol Berg in Berlin, Germany from June 12-13, where he will outline the core components of Waku and the tech stack’s utility in providing scalable and reliable p2p communication.

Several members of the Waku team are also looking forward to attending EthCC, which this year is being hosted in Cannes, France from June 20 - July 3. We can’t wait to see you there!

If you want to stay up to date with where to find the Waku team, follow our socials for the latest announcements on where we’ll be heading next.

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