1.6 KiB
1.6 KiB
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| Motivation and goals |
Waku as a family of protocols is designed to have a set of properties that are useful for many applications:
- Generalized messaging.
Many applications require some form of messaging protocol to communicate between different subsystems or different nodes. This messaging can be human-to-human or machine-to-machine or a mix. Waku is designed to work for all these scenarios.
- Peer-to-peer.
Applications sometimes have requirements that make them suitable for peer-to-peer solutions:
- Censorship-resistant with no single point of failure
- Adaptive and scalable network
- Shared infrastructure/service network
- Runs anywhere.
Applications often run in restricted environments, where resources or the environment is restricted in some fashion. For example:
- Limited bandwidth, CPU, memory, disk, battery, etc
- Not being publicly connectable
- Only being intermittently connected; mostly-offline
- Privacy-preserving.
Applications often have a desire for some privacy guarantees, such as:
- Pseudonymity and not being tied to any personally identifiable information (PII)
- Metadata protection in transit
- Various forms of unlinkability, etc
- Modular design.
Waku nodes are adaptive: you can turn several dials depending on your use case and environment.
For example:
- Low privacy/low resource usage vs high privacy/increased latency + bandwidth usage
- Providing resources to the network vs consuming resources
- Stronger guarantees for spam protection vs economic registration cost