57 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
57 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: What is Waku?
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slug: /
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---
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Waku is a family of peer-to-peer protocols that provide **secure and private communication** in a decentralized environment. It is designed to operate in **resource-limited environments**, making it suitable for various decentralized applications (dApps).
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Waku protocols ensure that users communication remains **censorship-resistant and privacy-preserving**, giving them complete control over their data. By incorporating Waku into your dApp, you can add decentralized communication features to your application **without compromising security or privacy**.
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## Motivation and Goals
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The Waku family of protocols is designed for diverse applications due to their properties, such as:
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### Generalized Messaging
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Many applications require some form of messaging protocol to facilitate communication between different subsystems or nodes. Waku is flexible and can be used for human-to-human and machine-to-machine messaging scenarios.
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### Peer-to-Peer
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Waku is suitable for applications that require a peer-to-peer approach, as it offers the following advantages:
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- Censorship resistance with no single point of failure.
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- Adaptive and scalable network.
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- Shared infrastructure/service network.
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### Platform Agnostic
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Waku can run on any platform or environment, even in restricted settings with limited resources like bandwidth, CPU, memory, disk, battery, etc. It can also function when the nodes are not publicly connected or are primarily offline.
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### Privacy-Preserving
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Waku can cater to applications that require privacy guarantees, such as:
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- Pseudonymity and not being tied to any personally identifiable information (PII).
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- Metadata protection in transit.
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- Various forms of unlinkability.
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### Modular Design
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Waku nodes are adaptive and can be customized based on the application's requirements and environment. Users can adjust several parameters, including:
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- Low privacy/low resource usage vs. high privacy/increased latency + bandwidth usage.
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- Providing resources to the network vs. consuming resources.
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- Stronger guarantees for spam protection vs. economic registration cost.
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## How Does Waku Work?
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The Waku Relay protocol is the foundation of the Waku Network, which employs a `pubsub` architecture built on the `libp2p gossipsub` protocol. In addition to this, various other Waku protocols have been created to facilitate specific functionalities, including but not limited to:
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1. Facilitating the retrieval of **historical messages** for primarily offline devices.
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2. Providing solutions for **encrypted communication**, such as symmetric encryption, ECIES/asymmetric encryption, and noise handshake-based key turns.
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3. Preserve bandwidth usage for **resource-limited environments**.
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4. Implementing economic **spam protection** (rate limits) while ensuring privacy.
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5. Developing methods to protect against mass deanonymization (currently being researched).
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If you want to learn more about how Waku operates, the [10/WAKU2](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/10/) RFC provides an in-depth look under the hood.
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