Vac has several research areas it is interested in and has or is developing expertise in. Here’s an overview of some of these areas along with motivation and what type of topics are included. Note that a lot of areas are overlapping in terms of specific projects.
In an open p2p network, nodes have to be incentivized for services provided to the network. Additionally, these should be privacy-preserving and as trust-minimized as possible. This research area includes (but is not limited to): RLN, service credentials, peer reputation, and protocol revenue.
Applied ZK opens up the door to many new constructs, especially related to privacy. This research area includes things like RLN, Unirep and similar novel constructs, but also things like R&D related to ZKs in general such as Circom, proves on mobile, different proof systems such as Halo 2, etc. Done in close collaboration with other teams in the space.
Making the network scalable in terms of number of nodes, messages supported, discovering of nodes, caching of historical messages etc. Largely focused on Waku right now, but things like scalable group chats also relevant here.
End to end data application synchronization protocols, FT Store, interfacing with long term storage, message bus guarantees, possibly CRDTs etc. Guiding principle is to provide additional guarantees for users of Waku (etc) in terms of user experience.
