Waku x TACo - P2P comms with decentralised encryption
Building truly decentralised, censorship-resistant, and private applications often requires multiple technologies working together. Waku, TACo (Threshold Access Control), and Codex are examples of decentralised protocols that complement each other to solve different challenges in creating private, censorship-resistant, and decentralised applications.
Waku provides a scalable, reliable peer-to-peer communications stack without relying on centralised servers, while Codex offers durable, censorship-resistant decentralised storage, ensuring that content remains verifiable and persistently available.
TACo provides a distributed architecture for secure cryptographic operations and decentralised encryption, moving the burden of trust for access control from big tech companies to a trustless, open-source protocol.
By integrating Waku protocols with TACo, we can provide a distributed, scalable peer-to-peer messaging layer that also supports programmable encryption and access control to ensure message security without introducing reliance on third-party centralised services.
Both projects are still under active development: Waku is implemented in production environments across several projects (including Railgun, The Graph, and Portrait), and its decentralised private DoS protection mechanism is undergoing testnet dogfooding. TACo is already available for testing and hacking, with a production-ready mainnet version offering full functionality via a decentralised key generation setup.
Together, these technologies can form a robust foundation for building secure and censorship-resistant applications.
When combined with the Codex distributed storage network, developers have a complete stack for real-time communication, durable storage, and granular access control.
Decentralised messaging with programmable access control
When Waku and TACo are combined, the result is a communication channel that is not only peer-to-peer and private but also encrypted and access-controlled from end to end.
Waku enables real-time, peer-to-peer message transport with support for in-browser light clients and protocol-level metadata privacy. TACo brings end-to-end encryption and programmable access conditions to the mix.
Rather than relying on a single central authority for encryption keys, TACo leverages a decentralised cohort of nodes that collaboratively generate public keys.
This has practical implications across a range of use cases. Developers can build collaboration tools where documents are synchronised in real time over Waku, stored durably via Codex, and protected through TACo’s conditional access.
Governance applications could use these technologies to collect votes securely and transparently, keeping them encrypted until final tallies are revealed. In social platforms or data markets, access to content can be tightly managed without sacrificing decentralisation or usability.
Cyphershare: Encrypted, durable, and P2P file-sharing
An early project that illustrates this integration in action is Cyphershare. Initially conceived as a proof-of-concept combining Waku and Codex, it has since integrated TACo for end-to-end encryption and fine-grained access control.
Cyphershare lets users securely share files in a fully decentralised way. Files are encrypted directly in the browser before being uploaded, and the encrypted data is stored on Codex’s decentralised storage network.
Waku handles the real-time, peer-to-peer distribution of metadata or notifications, ensuring that file-sharing activity remains serverless and resistant to surveillance.
The app uses TACo to define who can decrypt and access each file. Access conditions can include token ownership, membership in a defined group, or availability within a set time window.
A live version of Cyphershare is available here, standing as an example of how Waku, Codex and TACo together can support real-world use cases with strong guarantees around privacy, decentralisation, and user control.
If you are a developer interested in deploying Waku’s p2p comms stack with TACo, head over to the integration examples in the TACo documentation.