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Waku Monthly Update - October 2024

Waku team

• 3 min read
Waku Monthly Update - October 2024

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.

Over the past month, the Waku team continued to deliver regular updates on several fronts, strengthening the foundations of reliable, decentralised communication.

Below are some of the key highlights from Waku for October 2024.

Technical Updates

The Waku team made impressive progress on several key milestones in October, with the core focus remaining on improving the reliability and stability of the Waku protocol family.

Development of infrastructure for implementation in the Status Desktop and Mobile applications is proceeding in earnest, and significant progress has been made on several fronts. 

Below are a few of the key highlights of Waku’s technical updates over the past month.

Store Service Upgrade

The team made major progress in the development of an improved version of the Waku Store protocol, which will allow the network to provide distributed and synchronised store services.

Over the past month, research on this milestone has involved developing a proof-of-concept store synchronisation protocol that has undergone extensive debugging and testing.

The first MVP for Waku Sync has been delivered, and a few issues were quickly identified which the team is working to resolve. Waku Sync enables store nodes to sync messages and eliminate discrepancies

Rate-Limiting Nullifier Deployment

The Waku team continues to develop its flagship Rate-Limiting Nullifier (RLN) feature to mitigate spam and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a crucial component of an anonymous peer-to-peer communications network.

The next stage is to design and implement the economic component of this solution, for which the new contract specification is ready. The smart contract has been updated, and the team has proceeded with experimental deployments on the Linea testnet, after which the network will migrate to a new Linea testnet contract and subsequently to mainnet.

The team has also been dogfooding a public-facing RLNaaS (RLN-as-a-Service) web app built on js-waku, and several fixes and improvements have already been made as a result of this testing.

Bringing nwaku to Status Desktop

Steady progress is being made on integrating nwaku, a Nim implementation of the Waku protocol, into the Status Desktop app.

A key highlight from the last month was adding support for discovery of circuit-relay peers, marking a crucial landmark on the path to full implementation. Early Windows support was also added.

Looking ahead, the team will be testing out nwaku in the Status Desktop app and continuing to work on this milestone, which will see Status Desktop migrate to nwaku from go-waku once parity is reached.

By decommissioning go-waku and migrating to nwaku, the software will shift its dependencies to in-house libraries, with the goal of having a single Waku library for all native platforms. This will both reduce maintenance costs and ensure that Waku remains as robust as possible thanks to its usage in the Status apps.

For more information on Waku’s development, read the project’s milestones and roadmap.

Defending Against Spam on a P2P Network

Want to know more about how the Waku protocol mitigates the risks of DDoS attacks and prevents users from spamming the network with messages?

Waku Lead Franck Royer published an article this month that outlines the Waku RLN Relay protocol, an implementation of a Rate-Limiting Nullifier designed to protect the p2p Waku network from this type of abuse.

This piece forms part of an Explanation Series of posts that will be published on the Waku blog. The series aims to help developers understand how they can use Waku for their own applications and projects.

Read the full blog post on Waku’s RLN Relay here.

Upcoming Events

We are excited to share that Waku will be at Devcon 2024 in Bangkok from November 9 to 17!

Waku will be among several projects hosting dedicated booths at the Devcon 2024 Impact Forum, where we will have a dedicated space to engage with the community, answer questions about the Waku protocol, and demonstrate true p2p messaging in action. 

If you’re attending Devcon 2024, make sure you stop by and discover the future of censorship-resistant, decentralised communication. The Waku team will be at the following events over the convention:

While you’re in Bangkok, be sure to head to libp2p Day on November 12, where Waku Lead Franck Royer will deliver a keynote speech on the challenges of bringing libp2p to end-user devices.

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