Waku Monthly Update - May 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.
From scaling up Status Communities to improving documentation for onboarding new developers, the Waku team has delivered exciting progress in the past month.
Below are the highlights from Waku for May 2025.
Technical updates
For a full breakdown of Waku’s current state and development goals, read the project’s milestones and roadmap.
RLN contracts, incentivisation, and peer discovery
In May, the RLN system advanced significantly with the integration of new contract functionality into nwaku and the deprecation of local Merkle tree syncing in favour of on-chain sync. The updated approach allows Merkle tree calculations to be completed on-chain, which means nodes do not have to sync with all smart contract events at initialisation and are able to operate much master.
RLN tests were adapted to the new structure, and work on the RLNv2 web interface continued, focusing on membership and meta info, though some progress was delayed pending updates to nwaku-compose.
The Waku team also successfully implemented support for multiple RLN RPC clients in nwaku to provide Web3 RPC fallback capabilities for service nodes.
On the incentivisation front, development moved forward on REST API changes for integration with the incentivisation proof-of-concept, as well as on the Lightpush REST API and other integration-related components.
Peer discovery efforts progressed this last month through revisions to Sync specifications and ongoing development of the mixnet proof-of-concept. This included tackling stream handling at exit nodes and exploring SURB-based reply mechanisms.
Scalable communities, private messaging, and segmentation
The foundation for scalable Status Communities continued to strengthen. The team completed the first phase of community sharding by isolating communities in their own shards.
Testing and fixing of shard migration issues were completed, with plans to finish testing and begin dogfooding community shards.
Private chat hardening also moved forward in May, with the segmentation logic drafted in the new Nim Chat SDK repository. Work continued on reviewing segmentation logic in status-go, and the team progressed on refining the core proof-of-concept for rate limiting in private chats.
Waku web apps, messaging APIs, and system maintenance
One of the biggest highlights from the last month was the publication of a Scalable Data Sync (SDS) example in the lab.waku.org repository (the repository dedicated to experimental proof-of-concepts and research related to js-waku libraries).
JS-Waku development in May focused on monitoring tools, fleet status notifications, WSS support, and improved bootstrap reliability. A dockerised server is also being developed to simulate js-waku usage in headless browsers.
The messaging API in js-waku saw major updates, including dogfooding an event-based Filter API, refining validation logic to support hash-based store queries, and laying the groundwork for a Messaging Storage API. Improvements to messaging types and shard handling were ongoing.
Waku continued to work on hardening Qaku, the Q&A app powered by Waku and developing library components to containerise Waku features for use with other Logos protocols.
In May, the Waku team also made significant progress on planning out its development roadmap for the second half of the year.
Proposed goals for the rest of the year include delivering the remaining core components of the direct message reliability milestone, as well as implementing light push error protocols and beginning the first phase of PostgreSQL optimisation for Waku Store.
Improving documentation to onboard developers
Following a focused off-site in Croatia, the Waku team has renewed its efforts to make it easier for open-source developers to get started with the project.
Improving developer onboarding is now a key priority, with work underway to simplify and strengthen the Waku documentation.
Last month, the team reviewed gaps and challenges in the current docs. Proposed improvements include adding clearer, high-level explanations of the protocol, defining core terminology, and offering more practical guidance for contributors.
If you're an open-source developer and want to help shape this effort, join the ongoing discussion on the Vac forum. And if you believe in censorship-resistant, sovereign, and private communication, explore the Waku Docs and start contributing.
Past and upcoming events
The Waku team attended several events in May, and the calendar is looking busy for the months ahead.
On 22 May, Waku contributors and others from Logos celebrated Bitcoin Pizza Day by attending two events hosted by PizzaDAO, one in Brno and another in Los Angeles.
Waku’s Václav Pavlin travelled to ETH Prague from May 27 to 29 to connect with peers in the web3 space and also attended a Web3Privacy Now meetup on Shaping and Defending the Techno-Political Revolution together with speakers from Codex.
Looking ahead to June, the Waku team will be at Protocol Berg in Berlin, with Waku’s Sergei giving a presentation on 12 June about Waku’s decentralised marketplace and infrastructure for dapps. The Waku team will also be heading to a Web3Privacy Now hackathon hosted alongside this event.
June will see Václav head to DevConf in Brno, where he will be speaking about decentralising dev tools and AI agents. He is also planning a Logos meetup alongside the event. He will also travel to ETHCluj from June 26-28, which will be held at the Cluj-Napoca Technical University Hub in Romania.
A busy June will be rounded off by EthCC in Cannes, France from 30 June - 3 July. The Waku team will be attending the event, with Danish planning to host a technical workshop on the Waku tech stack and Sasha scheduled to deliver a presentation at the event.
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