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* Update _posts/2021-08-06-coscup-waku-ethereum.md

Co-authored-by: Franck Royer <franck@status.im>

* Update _posts/2021-08-06-coscup-waku-ethereum.md

Co-authored-by: Franck Royer <franck@status.im>

* Update _posts/2021-08-06-coscup-waku-ethereum.md

Co-authored-by: Franck Royer <franck@status.im>

* Update _posts/2021-08-06-coscup-waku-ethereum.md

Co-authored-by: Franck Royer <franck@status.im>

* Update _posts/2021-08-06-coscup-waku-ethereum.md

Co-authored-by: Hanno Cornelius <68783915+jm-clius@users.noreply.github.com>

* Update _posts/2021-08-06-coscup-waku-ethereum.md

Co-authored-by: Hanno Cornelius <68783915+jm-clius@users.noreply.github.com>

Co-authored-by: Franck Royer <franck@status.im>
Co-authored-by: Hanno Cornelius <68783915+jm-clius@users.noreply.github.com>

_posts/2021-08-06-coscup-waku-ethereum.md

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+---
+layout: post
+name:  "[Talk at COSCUP] Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging"
+title:  "[Talk at COSCUP] Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging"
+date:   2021-08-06 12:00:00 +0800
+author: oskarth
+published: true
+permalink: /waku-v2-ethereum-coscup
+categories: research
+summary: Learn more about Waku v2, its origins, goals, protocols, implementation and ongoing research. Understand how it is used and how it can be useful for messaging in Ethereum.
+image: /assets/img/coscup-waku/talk.png
+discuss: https://forum.vac.dev/t/discussion-talk-at-coscup-vac-waku-v2-and-ethereum-messaging/95
+---
+
+*This is the English version of a talk originally given in Chinese at COSCUP in Taipei. There is a [video recording](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0ATpQ4_XFc) with Chinese and English subtitles.*
+
+---
+
+## Introduction
+
+Hi everyone!
+
+Today I'll talk to you about Waku v2. What it is, what problems it is solving,
+and how it can be useful for things such as messaging in Ethereum. First, let me
+start with some brief background.
+
+## Brief history and background
+
+Back when Ethereum got started, there used to be this concept of the "holy
+trinity". You had Ethereum for compute/consensus, Swarm for storage, and Whisper
+for messaging. This is partly where the term Web3 comes from.
+
+Status started out as an app with the goal of being a window onto Ethereum and
+a secure messenger. As one of the few, if not the only, apps using Whisper in
+production, not to mention on a mobile phone, we quickly realized there were
+problems with the underlying protocols and infrastructure. Protocols such as
+Whisper weren't quite ready for prime time yet when it came to things such as
+scalability and working in the real world.
+
+As we started addressing some of these challenges, and moved from app
+developement to focusing on protocols, research and infrastructure, we created
+Vac. Vac is an r&d unit doing protocol research focused on creating modular p2p
+messaging protocols for private, secure, censorship resistant communication.
+
+I won't go into too much detail on the issues with Whisper, if you are
+interested in this check out this talk
+[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lLT33tsJjs) or this
+[article](https://vac.dev/fixing-whisper-with-waku).
+
+In a nutshell, we forked Whisper to address immediate shortcomings and this
+became Waku v1. Waku v2 is complete re-thought implementation from scratch on top
+of libp2p. This will be the subject of today's talk.
+
+## Waku v2
+
+### Overview
+
+Waku v2 is a privacy-preserving peer-to-peer messaging protocol for resource
+restricted devices. We can look at Waku v2 as several things:
+
+- Set of protocols
+- Set of implementations
+- Network of nodes
+
+Let's first look at what the goals are.
+
+### Goals
+
+Waku v2 provides a PubSub based messaging protocol with the following
+characteristics:
+
+1. **Generalized messaging**. Applications that require a messaging protocol to
+   communicate human to human, machine to machine, or a mix.
+2. **Peer-to-peer**. For applications that require a p2p solution.
+3. **Resource restricted**. For example, running with limited bandwidth, being
+   mostly-offline, or in a browser.
+4. **Privacy**. Applications that have privacy requirements, such as pseudonymity,
+   metadata protection, etc.
+
+And to provide these properties in a modular fashion, where applications can
+choose their desired trade-offs.
+
+### Protocols
+
+Waku v2 consists of several protocols. Here we highlight a few of the most
+important ones:
+
+- 10/WAKU2 - main specification, details how all the pieces fit together
+- 11/RELAY - thin layer on top of GossipSub for message dissemination
+- 13/STORE - fetching of historical messages
+- 14/MESSAGE - message payload
+
+This is the recommended subset for a minimal Waku v2 client.
+
+In addition to this there are many other types of specifications at various
+stages of maturity, such as: content based filtering, bridge mode to Waku v1,
+JSON RPC API, zkSNARKS based spam protection with RLN, accounting and
+settlements with SWAP, fault-tolerant store nodes, recommendations around topic
+usage, and more.
+
+See https://rfc.vac.dev/ for a full overview.
+
+### Implementations
+
+Waku v2 consists of multiple implementations. This allows for client diversity,
+makes it easier to strengthen the protocols, and allow people to use Waku v2 in
+different contexts.
+
+- nim-waku - the reference client written in Nim, most full-featured.
+- js-waku - allow usage of Waku v2 from browsers, focus on interacting with dapps.
+- go-waku - subset of Waku v2 to ease integration into the Status app.
+
+### Testnet Huilong and dogfooding
+
+In order to test the protocol we have setup a testnet across all implementations
+called Huilong. Yes, that's the Taipei subway station!
+
+![](assets/img/coscup-waku/huilong.jpg)
+
+Among us core devs we have disabled the main #waku Discord channel used for
+development, and people run their own node connected to this toy chat application.
+
+Feel free to join and say hi! Instructions can be found here:
+
+- [nim-waku chat](https://github.com/status-im/nim-waku/blob/master/docs/tutorial/chat2.md)
+
+- [js-waku chat](https://status-im.github.io/js-waku/)
+
+- [go-waku chat](https://github.com/status-im/go-waku/tree/master/examples/chat2)
+
+### Research
+
+While Waku v2 is being used today, we are actively researching improvements.
+Since the design is modular, we can gracefully introduce new capabilities. Some
+of these research areas are:
+
+- Privacy-preserving spam protection using zkSNARKs and RLN
+- Accounting and settlement of resource usage to incentivize nodes to provide services with SWAP
+- State synchronization for store protocol to make it easier to run a store node without perfect uptime
+- Better node discovery
+- More rigorous privacy analysis
+- Improving interaction with wallets and dapp
+
+## Use cases
+
+Let's look at where Waku v2 is and can be used.
+
+### Prelude: Topics in Waku v2
+
+To give some context, there are two different types of topics in Waku v2. One is
+a PubSub topic, for routing. The other is a content topic, which is used for
+content based filtering. Here's an example of the default PubSub topic:
+
+`/waku/2/default-waku/proto`
+
+This is recommended as it increases privacy for participants and it is stored by
+default, however this is up to the application.
+
+The second type of topic is a content topic, which is application specific. For
+example, here's the content topic used in our testnet:
+
+`/toychat/2/huilong/proto`
+
+For more on topics, see https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/23/
+
+### Status app
+
+In the Status protocol, content topics - topics in Whisper/Waku v1 - are used for several things:
+
+- Contact code topic to discover X3DH bundles for perfect forward secrecy
+	- Partitioned into N (currently 5000) content topics to balance privacy with efficiency
+- Public chats correspond to hash of the plaintext name
+- Negotiated topic for 1:1 chat with DHKE derived content topic
+
+See more here https://specs.status.im/spec/10
+
+Currently, Status app is in the process of migrating to and testing Waku v2.
+
+### DappConnect: Ethereum messaging
+
+It is easy to think of Waku as being for human messaging, since that's how it is
+primarily used in the Status app, but the goal is to be useful for generalized
+messaging, which includes Machine-To-Machine (M2M) messaging.
+
+Recall the concept of the holy trinity with Ethereum/Swarm/Whisper and Web3 that
+we mentioned in the beginning. Messaging can be used as a building block for
+dapps, wallets, and users to communicate with each other. It can be used for
+things such as:
+
+- Multisig and DAO vote transactions only needing one on-chain operation
+- Giving dapps ability to send push notifications to users
+- Giving users ability to directly respond to requests from dapps
+- Decentralized WalletConnect
+- Etc
+
+Basically anything that requires communication and doesn't have to be on-chain.
+
+### WalletConnect v2
+
+WalletConnect is an open protocol for connecting dapps to wallets with a QR
+code. Version 2 is using Waku v2 as a communication channel to do so in a
+decentralized and private fashion.
+
+![](assets/img/coscup-waku/walletconnect.png)
+
+See for more: https://docs.walletconnect.org/v/2.0/tech-spec
+
+WalletConnect v2 is currently in late alpha using Waku v2.
+
+### More examples
+
+- Gasless voting and vote aggregation off-chain
+- Dapp games using Waku as player discovery mechanism
+- Send encrypted message to someone with an Ethereum key
+- <Your dapp here>
+
+These are all things that are in progress / proof of concept stage.
+
+## Contribute
+
+We'd love to see contributions of any form!
+
+- You can play with it here: [nim-waku chat](https://github.com/status-im/nim-waku/blob/master/docs/tutorial/chat2.md) (/ [js-waku browser chat](https://status-im.github.io/js-waku/))
+- Use Waku to build a dapp: [js-waku docs](https://status-im.github.io/js-waku/docs/)
+- Contribute to code: [js-waku](https://github.com/status-im/js-waku) / [nim-waku](https://github.com/status-im/nim-waku)
+- Contribute to specs: [vacp2p/rfc](https://github.com/vacp2p/rfc)
+- We are hiring: Wallet & Dapp Integration Developer, Distributed Systems Engineer, Protocol Engineer, Protocol Researcher - all [job listings](https://status.im/our_team/jobs.html)
+- Join our new [Discord](https://discord.gg/bJCTqS5H)
+
+## Conclusion
+
+In this talk we've gone over the original vision for Web3 and how Waku came to
+be. We've also looked at what Waku v2 aims to do. We looked at its protocols,
+implementations, the current testnet as well as briefly on some ongoing
+research for Vac.
+
+We've also looked at some specific use cases for Waku. First we looked at how
+Status uses it with different topics. Then we looked at how it can be useful for
+messaging in Ethereum, including for things like WalletConnect.
+
+I hope this talk gives you a better idea of what Waku is, why it exists, and
+that it inspires you to contribute, either to Waku itself or by using it in your
+own project!