waku.guide/docs/7.md

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 RFC.