waku.guide/docs/overview/history.md

---
title: The Story of Waku
---

Waku v1 was a fork of Whisper with some added tweaks for efficiency. Waku v2 is a completely redesigned suite of protocols designed to address the goals set out [previously](/#motivation-and-goals).

```mermaid
%%{init: { 'logLevel': 'debug', 'theme': 'base', 'gitGraph': {'showBranches': true, 'showCommitLabel':true,'mainBranchName': 'HISTORY'}} }%%
gitGraph
    commit id:"2013"
    commit id:"2015" tag:"R&D"
    commit id:"2018" tag:"R&D" type: HIGHLIGHT
    branch v1
    checkout v1
    commit id:"2020" tag:"release"
    checkout HISTORY
    merge v1
    branch v2
    checkout v2
    commit id:"2021" tag:"release"
    checkout HISTORY
    merge v2
    commit id:"🔥"
```

### 2013

The introduction of the Ethereum White Paper marked the unveiling of the Holy Trinity, which comprises Ethereum for consensus, Swarm for decentralized storage, and Whisper for peer-to-peer messaging.

### 2015-2018

The development of the Whisper protocol lagged behind the advancements made by the Ethereum EVM and Swarm, primarily because there was no dedicated team working on building the protocol.

### 2018

Due to the lack of progress made on Whisper and growing concerns around scalability, Vac was established to focus on researching and developing more scalable peer-to-peer messaging solutions.

### 2020

Status introduced Waku v1 as its messaging protocol, which replaced Whisper.

### 2021

Waku v2 supersedes Waku v1.