Waku Monthly Update - November 2024

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November was an exciting month for the Waku team. We had a major presence at Devcon 2024 in Bangkok and the Parallel Society Congress presented by Logos, and we also used the opportunity of having the wider team together to hold strategy and planning sessions at an offsite gathering before these events.

In addition to travelling to Bangkok and interfacing with the Ethereum community, the Waku team continued to improve on various elements of the protocol family.

Below are a few of the key highlights from Waku for November 2024.

Technical Updates

Aside from travelling to Devcon and an offsite team meetup to participate in strategy workshops, the Waku team continued to make good progress on protocol development.

Incentivisation for Waku Infrastructure Nodes

Research is underway on an incentivisation scheme for operating Waku service nodes, and the team has resumed developing a proof-of-concept for this mechanism.

Waku is also evaluating the feasibility of different verification methods for this incentivisation system, including SP1, RISC Zero, and Circom, to verify that computation has been performed successfully and reward operators.

Incentivising the provision of light protocol services, such as Waku Store, on the network was one of the many topics discussed by the team during strategy meetings at the Waku meetup before Devcon 2024.

nwaku in Status Desktop

The Waku team continues to make steady progress on integrating nwaku, the reference implementation of the Waku protocol written in Nim, into the Status Desktop app.

Last month, we made significant progress on peer management and discovery, including adding support for the discovery of circuit-relay peers–an important step in achieving parity with go-waku ahead of switching Status Desktop over to the nwaku implementation.

This migration is part of a shift to in-house libraries that aims to unify Waku across platforms, reducing maintenance costs and enhancing robustness in Status apps.

Read the latest weekly updates from Waku.

Waku at Devcon 2024

The Waku team joined many other projects in the industry at Devcon 2024 in Bangkok this past month–a seminal event in the global crypto calendar.

The team hosted a booth at the Devcon Impact Forum, which provided an excellent opportunity to catch up on the latest developments in the Ethereum ecosystem and to connect with others working on furthering decentralisation and building apps that could benefit from Waku’s P2P communications infrastructure.

Waku hosted several talks and workshops at Devcon, with members of the team showcasing the use cases of the protocol and addressing the challenges in P2P protocol design faced by many in the blockchain ecosystem.

The following sessions are now available to watch on YouTube:

• Bringing peer-to-peer networks to ALL the peers (Franck)
• RLNv2: enhanced spam protection for all peer-to-peer networks (Franck and Alvaro)
• Permissionless P2P with The Waku Network (Sasha and Ivan)

Waku’s presence in Bangkok extended far beyond just the stages at Devcon. Franck, Hanno, and Simon-Pierre gave a keynote presentation at libp2p Day on November 12th, and the team hosted a workshop at the Intents & Chain Abstraction Summit on November 13th. 

Waku also had a major presence at the Parallel Society Congress hosted by Logos on November 11th, with Franck hosting a panel discussion on Parallel Society Tech: State of the Art and Future. Waku’s Vaclav also showcased the Qaku app at the Parallel Society Congress and the Decentralised Data Summit hosted by Codex, demonstrating an online Q&A platform powered by the Waku P2P communications protocol.

Team Meetup

The Waku team gathered in Bangkok from November 7th to 15th for an offsite meetup, which provided a valuable opportunity for the team to come together in person, discuss progress, and align priorities for the months ahead.

The offsite included a team retrospective, where members reflected on achievements and challenges from recent initiatives and held dedicated discussions for various development teams, including research, nwaku, js-waku, and chat. 

These focused sessions enabled each group to delve into their specific goals, share updates, and identify areas where cross-team collaboration could enhance progress. The Waku team also used this opportunity to deepen collaboration with various IFT teams, such as Status and Vac.

Explore P2P Messaging and Light Protocols

Want to wrap your head around the core principles of P2P messaging and how this works on Waku?

Last month, we published a blog post that provides an overview of P2P messaging, how it differs from the ubiquitous centralised communications infrastructure in use today, and how Waku offers a scalable and reliable alternative.

Read more about how P2P messaging works on Waku here.

Waku lead Franck Royer also published an article last month that explains an important facet of the Waku protocol - light protocols and edge nodes.

In this piece, Franck outlines the topology of the Waku network, how nodes are categorised according to their provision of services such as relay, storage, and light push protocols, and how Waku aims to deliver trustless P2P messaging infrastructure for end-user devices or edge nodes that do not operate service or relay infrastructure.

Read the explainer series post about light protocols and edge nodes on Waku.

Upcoming Events

With the year coming to a close and Devcon now behind us, there are no more events planned until next year. 

The Waku team is wrapping up a productive 2024 with exciting progress on key milestones and is already focused on the roadmap for the year ahead. Stay tuned for news on our plans and developments as we gear up for what promises to be an exciting 2025.

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