Waku — the P2P Communication Protocol for Web3 Recognized by Vitalik Buterin

In a recent blog post from Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin, he describes Waku as realizing Gavin Wood's vision of a scalable decentralized messaging protocol.

"In 2014, Gavin Wood introduced Ethereum as one of a suite of tools that can be built, the other … being Whisper (decentralized messaging)... The former was heavily emphasized, but with the turn toward financialization around 2017 the latter [was] unfortunately given much less love and attention. That said, Whisper continues to exist as Waku, and is being actively used by projects like the decentralized messenger Status," Vitalik Buterin says.

Speaking on Buterin's comment, Waku's Lead, Franck Royer, said:

"We are always thrilled when Vitalik recognizes Waku as a continuation of Gavin Wood's web3 vision. It has been hugely important for us to build Waku in such a way that preserves the original cypherpunk values he acknowledged in his blog post, including permissionless participation, decentralization, and censorship resistance."

The Need for a Cypherpunk Communications Layer

Tech giants are the primary controllers of the internet today. They can dictate what we see, when we see it, and how we exchange data, with access to vast quantities of users' data that can be leveraged for commercial and even political purposes. In 2013, a group of like-minded individuals led by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood saw these tech giants' unrivaled influence and set out to launch a suite of protocols that would disrupt the current structure.

The Ethereum community began developing the Holy Trinity of the decentralized web—computation, storage, and communication. The idea was that the Ethereum Network would serve a computational purpose, empowering developers to build and launch DApps. Swarm and Whisper were to act as storage and communication protocols, respectively. Unfortunately, scalability issues halted Whisper's progress, prompting the need for a more adequate communication layer.

Waku Steps In

In 2018, the R&D group Vac initiated research for a viable alternative, which resulted in the development of Waku. Waku is an open-source, public good messaging protocol. Its core protocol is implemented as a minor extension of libp2p GossipSub. It includes features like historic message retrieval for offline devices, adaptive nodes for increased accessibility, and innovative privacy-preserving DoS protection.

Waku is used by Railgun, the Graph, and Status. It currently powers the communication layer of the Logos technology stack.

Key Features of the Waku Network

Waku was designed as an open-source communications layer for the decentralized web, and as such, it is composed of the following:

• Peer-to-Peer: The Waku Network features a decentralized peer-to-peer topology that can prevent censorship and provide surveillance resistance.
• Generalized: Waku focuses on generalized and transient messaging that facilitates communication between users, nodes, or subsystems.
• Privacy-focused: Waku's suite of resources enables developers to build apps incapable of harvesting users' data if they so choose.
• Platform agnostic: Waku's ability to run on any platform and environment is a distinguishing feature of this peer-to-peer communication protocol. It is an adequate messaging solution for decentralized applications (DApps), regardless of their host network.
• Modularity: Waku's modules empower developers to make necessary compromises based on users' performance and privacy demands.

Setting the Foundation for Millions of Users

The Waku team recently launched a first-of-its-kind Denial of Service (DoS) protection that does not compromise censorship resistance or privacy. Per the team, this release will act as a catalyst for supporting one million users on the network. Before now, the largest number of users on a decentralized peer-to-peer system was 150,000 on the BitTorrent network. The DoS protection will scale the Waku Network while enabling user privacy.

If you’re interested in the Web3 communications protocol supported by Buterin himself, follow Waku on X or join the community on Discord.