---
title: How does it work?
---

The backbone of Waku Network is the Waku Relay protocol.
It is a pubsub protocol based on libp2p gossipsub.
Other Waku protocols have been defined to enable capabilities such as:

1. retrieving **historical messages** for mostly-offline devices
2. key turn solution for **encrypted communication** (symmetric encryption, ECIES/asymmetric encryption, noise handshake).
3. preserving bandwidth usage for **resource-restricted devices**
4. Economic **spam protection** (rate limit) with privacy preserving capabilities
5. Mass deanonymization protection (research in progress)

If you want to learn how Waku works under the hoods, check out the [10/WAKU2](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/10/) RFC.