25 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
25 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Why Waku?
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---
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Communication in the present day is heavily influenced by third-party intervention, ranging from censorship and deplatforming to intermediaries that seek to profit from rent and the misuse of data in the surveillance economy.
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Waku is intended to empower individuals by returning control of communication to them. It is the go-to standard for Web3 communication, offering a **scalable decentralized communication** solution.
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- Waku improves upon Whisper's capabilities by overcoming limitations and addressing functional gaps.
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- It provides a public infrastructure for the Ethereum and multi-chain ecosystem, serving as a common good.
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- It is not confined to a particular blockchain.
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- It is modular, adaptable, and can cater to various use cases.
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- It allows developers to decentralize communication in their dApps or move actions off-chain while maintaining decentralization.
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- It can run on various platforms, including mobile devices, cloud environments, web browsers, native desktop apps, or even a [Dappnode](https://dappnode.com/)!
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## Whisper vs. Waku: Why Waku is Necessary
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| | Whisper | Waku |
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| - | - | - |
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| **Scalability** | Whisper doesn't scale very well, specifically when it comes to bandwidth usage on mobile devices. | Uses gossipsub and content topics. |
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| **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. |
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| **Incentivization Infrastructure** | There is no incentive to run a Whisper node. | Research in progress to design incentivization for node operators. |
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| **Formal Specification/Documentation** | Lack of formal and unambiguous specification. | The specs and docs are open-source and licensed under CC0, making them freely available for anyone to read, modify and improve without restrictions. |
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| **Portability** | Runs over devp2p which limits where Whisper can run and how. | Waku is built using libp2p, making it easy to run Waku anywhere. |
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