Waku Monthly Update - October 2025
In October, the Waku team made great progress on protocol development and explored new applications of the stack through an internal hackathon.
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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.
In October, the Waku team made great progress on protocol development and explored new applications of the stack through an internal hackathon.
We also announced our P2P Hacker Lounge event in Buenos Aires next month, and Waku lead Franck Royer kick-started a productive discussion around providing an easy-to-use API with built-in reliability systems for developers.
Below are the highlights from Waku for October 2025.
Technical Updates
Service incentivisation and RLN testnet
October saw steady progress on service incentivisation. The team published a forum post reviewing prior work on off-chain micropayments and proposing an MVP payment protocol, alongside new documentation on on-chain options and private streams.
Research expanded to pseudonymous payment schemes with stealth addresses, gasless transactions, and using Nescience as a privacy layer.
In parallel, RLN testnet work continued with successful TST contract updates, verified ETH minting, and improved browser credential handling through the upgraded zerokit in Waku RLN.
Reliability, Status, and Chat SDK
Work on end-to-end reliability advanced as SDS integration in Status neared merge and CI improvements were prepared.
Experimental SDS-R integration began in js-waku, with basic implementation and testing underway.
The Chat SDK made strong progress on encryption with a draft Noise protocol supporting multiple patterns (KN, KX, NN, XX), plus completed segmentation specs and improved flexibility for future messaging features.
Developer experience and web applications
Developer experience continued to improve across the stack. The Waku API saw progress on the Send, Storage, and Health APIs, while a new local development harness simplified browser testing.
Early work also began on WebRTC signalling over Waku. On the application side, OpChan gained cleaner APIs, better documentation, and an AI app-generation feature.
Qaku launched a full redesign with a new web interface and desktop app, further broadening Waku’s app ecosystem.
Mixnet, infrastructure, and js-waku
Mixnet integration was completed, with libp2p mix now part of LightPush and tested across multi-node simulations.
Static mix node configurations were deployed on the test network, and rendezvous updates in nim-libp2p improved discovery. Maintenance work across js-waku and nwaku focused on stability and modernisation, including refactored testing, React framework support, stream-closing fixes, dependency upgrades, and preparation for the js-waku v0.37.0 release.
Together, these updates continue to strengthen reliability and developer experience across the Waku stack.
RealFi Hackathon winners revealed
From 23 September to 16 October 2025, Logos and Funding the Commons hosted the RealFi Hackathon, a global event focused on turning privacy technology into real-world tools.
Builders teamed up to tackle two key challenges:
- Resilient Activist Technology: protecting activists from censorship and surveillance.
- Logos x Tor Privacy Infrastructure: advancing Tor-compatible systems that strengthen privacy online.
Backed by Logos, the hackathon pushed forward the mission to create modular, censorship-resistant communication tools for open societies worldwide.
The winners of the Logos x Tor Project track were Shielded Micropay, which combined Railgun and payment channels for private, verifiable billing of services, and Tohaku, a Tor/Nym-enabled Ethereum wallet that protects users from RPC tracking and metadata leaks.
Exploring Reliable Channels
Last month, Waku lead Franck Royer published a detailed post on the Vac forum outlining the Reliable Channel API, which builds on the ongoing work around the Waku API and Chat SDK. The post proposes a clear layered model that distinguishes between message routing (handled by the Waku API) and application-level features such as segmentation, rate limiting, and scalable data sync.
Discussion centred around the proposed deployment of what has previously been referred to as the Waku Application SDK, an opinionated layer on top of Waku that enables e2e reliability (SDS) with smooth handling of Waku restrictions: message size (segmentation) and RLN Relay (message rate limit manager).
This proposed update to Waku's architecture aims to make it easy and fool-proof for developers to implement while ensuring a base level of reliability.
If you’re interested in Waku’s evolving architecture and SDK development, read the full post for a deep dive into the proposed structure.
Vibe coding and internal hackathon
In October, the Waku team continued exploring AI-assisted vibe coding to find and experiment with use cases building on the Waku stack.
These sessions were livestreamed on the Logos YouTube channel and included guests from within Logos and others interested in building with scalable and reliable p2p comms.
Check out a few of the Waku team’s latest vibe coding sessions below:
Close to the end of October, Waku also hosted an internal hackathon, exploring applications and proof-of-concepts that leverage Waku protocols.
These hackathon demo sessions were livestreamed on the Logos YouTube channel, with breakdowns of the individual projects and sessions coming soon.
For now, you can watch the internal hackathon demo sessions livestreams below:
Join the P2P Hacker Lounge
We announced this month that as part of Logos, Waku will host the P2P Privacy Hacker Lounge event in Buenos Aires on Saturday, November 22.
The event will blend learning, casual hacking, networking, and open discussions.
Speakers include James Campbell from Threshold / TACo, Ameen from 0xbow/Privacy Pools, Oleksandr Kurbatov from DistributedLab, and Max Hampshire from Nym.
Hacking zones, demos, lightning talks, and workshops will all feature at the event, alongside vibe coding sessions, networking, and a closing talk by the co-founder of Logos - Jarrad Hope.
Check out the full agenda and RSVP to join the P2P Hacker Lounge.
Logos Circles and events
As the communications component of Logos, the Waku team was well represented at several Logos Circle events around the world last month, along with contributors from other Logos projects and like-minded developers and activists interested in joining the Logos movement.
Logos Circle events were held in 15 cities across the world last month, with Logos bringing people and ideas together from Los Angeles and Lisbon to as far abroad as Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan and Ilorin in Nigeria.
Follow our socials for the latest news from the Waku team and announcements on where we’ll be heading next.
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