waku.guide/docs/why-waku.md

---
title: Why Waku?
---

Communication today is rife with third party interference.
From censorship and deplatforming, to rent seeking intermediaries, to the misuse of data in the surveillance economy.

Waku is designed to place control of communication back into the hands of the individual.

It is the communication layer for Web3 -- **decentralized communication that scales**.

- Waku fills the void left by Whisper.

- We are building Waku as a public good for the Ethereum and multi-chain ecosystem.

- It is not tied to a specific chain.

- It is modular and adaptive, enabling various use cases.

- It enables developers to decentralize communication in their dApps or move actions off-chain without compromising decentralization.

- It aims to run anywhere, in the cloud and browser alike.

Private. Secure. Runs anywhere.

|                                        | Whisper                                                                                                       |                                 Waku                                  |
| -------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | :-------------------------------------------------------------------: |
| **Scalability**                        | Whisper doesn't scale very well, specifically when it comes to bandwidth usage on mobile devices.             |                  Uses gossipsub and content topics.                   |
| **Spam Resistance**                    | Proof of work requires too much battery and compute power making it a poor mechanism for heterogeneous nodes. |   Uses innovative p2p economic spam protection mechanism RLN Relay    |
| **No incentivized infrastructure**     | There is no incentive to run a Whisper node                                                                   |  Research in progress to design incentivization for node operators.   |
| **Formal Specification/Documentation** | Lack of formal and unambiguous specification                                                                  | Open source specs & docs and available for anyone to read or improve. |
| **Portability**                        | Runs over devp2p which limits where Whisper can run and how                                                   |   Waku is built using libp2p, making it easy to run Waku anywhere.    |