---
title: Main
---
# Vac researches peer-to-peer, private, censorship resistant communication.


## About Vac
Vac is an R&D org creating modular p2p protocols for private, secure, censorship resistant communication.

### Researching All Layers
Concerned with all layers in the stack including underlying transports, p2p overlays and routing, initial trust establishment, and semantics for things like group chat.

### Peer-to-Peer
The protocols we work on are pure peer-to-peer, and aim to minimize centralization. This too is in opposition to many initiatives in the secure messaging space.

### Security, Privacy, Censorship Resistance
Assumes the basics such as end-to-end encryption, forward secrecy, avoiding MITM-attacks. Vac also places a premium on privacy and censorship resistance from port blocking, traffic analysis, and similar.

### Modular System
Provide options at each layer in the stack, instead of having a tightly coupled set of protocols. Allowing developers to choose what they use and ensure they know each choice comes with different trade-offs.


### Generalized Messaging
This includes both human to human communication, as well as machine to machine communication. Texting, data transfer, financial transactions, state channels and more.

## Principles

The goal of Vac is widespread adoption of the decentralized web. Our challenge is achieving mass adoption while staying true to our principles outlined below.

### I. Liberty

We believe in the sovereignty of individuals. As a research organization that stands for the cause of personal liberty, we aim to maximize social, political, and economic freedoms. This includes being coercion-resistant.

### II. Censorship resistance

We enable free flow of information. No content is under surveillance. We abide by the cryptoeconomic design principle of censorship resistance. Even stronger, we design agnostic infrastructures for information.

### III. Security

We don't compromise on security when building features. We use state-of-the-art technologies, and research new security methods and technologies to make strong security guarantees.

### IV. Privacy

Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. For us, it's essential to protect privacy in both communications and transactions, as well as pseudo-anonymity. Additionally, we strive to provide the right of total anonymity.

### V. Transparency

We strive for complete openness and symmetry of information within the organization, and have no border between our core contributors and our community. We are frank about our shortcomings, especially when making short-term tradeoffs in service of our long-term goals.

### VI. Openness

The software we create is a public good. It is made available via a free and open source license, for anyone to share, modify and benefit from. We believe in permission-less participation.

### VII. Decentralization

We minimize centralization across both the software and the organization itself. In other words, we maximize the number of physical computers composing the network, and maximize the number of individuals who have control over the system(s) we are building.

### VIII. Inclusivity

We believe in fair and widespread access to our software, with an emphasis on ease-of-use. This also extends to social inclusivity, permissionless participation, interoperability, and investing in educational efforts.

### IX. Continuance

We create software incentivized to continue to exist and improve, without the stewardship of a single entity or any of the current team members.

### X. Resourcefulness

We are relentlessly resourceful. As we grow and have ready access to capital, it is our obligation to token holders to fight bureaucracy and inefficiencies within the organization. This means solving problems in the most effective way possible at lower economic costs (in terms of capital, time and resources).

## Research
The research team is focused on research and specifications of protocols within the general scope of Vac. Waku v2 is the current main focus, and the main client is nim-waku.

[Go to research page](/research)

Vac RFCs: https://rfc.vac.dev/ |
Specs repo: https://github.com/vacp2p/rfc |
Board: https://github.com/orgs/vacp2p/projects/5 |
Forum: https://forum.vac.dev/