Waku powers p2p comms at W3PN Berlin Hackathon
From June 13–15, 2025, the W3PN Hacks hackathon in Berlin brought together a global mix of builders, designers, and researchers committed to digital sovereignty.
Hosted by Web3Privacy Now (W3PN), the three-day event focused on building tools to help defend civil liberties, resist surveillance, protect privacy, and bolster digital freedom. W3PN’s hackathons are not about corporate sponsorships or bounties but principles and meaningful impact.
Over three days, participants tackled real problems with open minds, veteran mentorship, and a focus on resisting surveillance and reclaiming agency in our digital lives.
Amongst the winners at the end of the event were three standout projects that supported the Waku stack for peer-to-peer communications, proving its value as a versatile and reliable privacy-first solution for decentralised applications.
Let’s take a look at each of these early proof-of-concepts from the hackathon that are able to leverage Waku for p2p comms:
Aside
Aside is a minimalist chat tool built for conversations that shouldn’t be happening on centralised messengers. Imagine Incognito Mode for conversations, except it is truly private.
The core notion of the project is to deliver a private, decentralised, and ephemeral channel into which users can ‘step aside’ and discuss sensitive topics they would rather not share within a centralised messenger.
The tool facilitates real-time, peer-to-peer messaging with no persistence and no accounts. Messages are only delivered when both participants are online, and once the session ends, everything vanishes without a trace.
Aside uses Waku to handle live message transmission, but strips away everything else. There is no media, no retry logic, and no onboarding. Users share session invites via clipboard, and the UI is intentionally bare, offering a black screen and a place to type.
The goal is to make privacy fast, frictionless, and the default. Because of Waku’s lightweight and decentralised design, the protocol fits perfectly with Aside’s no-storage, no-tracking approach.
Portal
The third Waku-enabled project from W3PN Hacks, Portal, aims to create geolocation-based group chats with built-in privacy.
Participants can discover local chat rooms via a map interface, join discussions, and send messages without relying on any centralised infrastructure.
In the working version, Waku was used as a messaging transport layer with two channels: one for chat messages and one for handling friend requests and key exchanges.
While Supabase was used to store and retrieve message history for the proof-of-concept demonstration, further development on local storage of message histories or integration with distributed storage such as Codex could also be employed for trustless message persistence.
During the hackathon, Portal succeeded in demonstrating its core concept - decentralised, censorship-resistant group chats tied to location.
With further development, the team envisions that Portal could evolve into a fully autonomous communication layer where users can discover and engage in hyperlocal conversations without ever touching a central server.
Open Lavatory
Open Lavatory is a protocol designed to enable encrypted, local-first connections between dapps and cryptocurrency wallets without relying on centralised relay servers.
While in the end the team didn’t use Waku during the hackathon, the protocol can be integrated with Waku for decentralised signalling, making for a powerful potential use case.
In the current Ethereum ecosystem, most dapps connect via @reown/appkit, previously WalletConnect v2, which hardcodes a central relay server and removes the option to self-host or specify a bridge, thereby introducing a centralised RPC endpoint by default.
Open Lavatory counters this by allowing dapps to establish peer-to-peer connections using public signalling servers for the initial handshake and then shifting to direct WebRTC communication secured by asymmetric encryption.
Waku can be used in the signalling phase, replacing centralised servers and enabling true decentralisation from the first interaction.
First, the dapp generates a keypair and shares a connection URL via QR code or copy-paste. Then both peers can use Waku for signalling, perform a secure handshake using hybrid encryption, and establish a WebRTC connection that facilitates encrypted JSON-RPC messaging directly between devices.
While still an early prototype, Open Lavatory represents a much-needed reassertion of user sovereignty in wallet-dapp connectivity, especially as centralised infrastructure becomes the norm.
Start building with Waku
These prototypes emerged from just 48 hours of focused effort, but they reflect the industry’s latent desire and ability to build tools that preserve privacy and freedom. For those building with digital sovereignty in mind, Waku is the natural choice for scalable and reliable p2p communication.
If you are a developer looking for a privacy-preserving, p2p communications protocol that works at scale and in resource-constrained environments, head over to our docs to start building with Waku.
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