Blockchain technology is powerful, but it doesn’t inherently guarantee privacy. It offers pseudonymous transactions {the use of a fictitious or false name (a pseudonym) instead of a real, legal name to engage in online activities.
When Ethereum was first conceived, its creators envisioned more than just a decentralized financial system. They imagined a complete ecosystem where computation, storage, and communication could take place without central control the "holy trinity" of censorship resistance. To achieve this, three core technologies were introduced:
- Ethereum for decentralized computation
- Swarm for decentralized storage
- Whisper for peer-to-peer communication
Whisper: The First Attempt at Decentralized Messaging
Whisper was designed to enable private, censorship-resistant messaging between users and decentralized applications (dApps). At its core, it allowed encrypted messages to be sent across a distributed network, ensuring anonymity and resistance to surveillance.
However, its design quickly showed limitations. Every node in the network had to process every single message, regardless of relevance. While this approach was simple, it became:
- Resource-heavy – excessive bandwidth and storage usage
- Mobile-unfriendly – drained battery and consumed resources
- Spam-prone – no effective protection against malicious traffic
As adoption grew, these flaws became unbearable. Whisper was ambitious, but its lack of scalability prevented it from being viable in real-world applications.
👉 Read more about Whisper here
The Birth of Waku
Recognizing Whisper’s shortcomings, Vac — the research arm of Status, introduced Waku in 2018 as its successor. Waku started as a fork of Whisper, preserving its core ideas but re-engineering the design for practicality.
Waku v1: A Bridge Protocol
Released in 2020, Waku v1 kept much of Whisper’s architecture but stripped away unnecessary complexity. This made it easier for developers experimenting with Whisper to migrate their applications without starting over. However, it was only a stepping stone. The architectural flaws of Whisper were too deep, and the ecosystem needed a more radical redesign.
Waku v2: A Complete Rewrite
The real breakthrough came with Waku v2, a full redesign of the protocol. Instead of broadcasting every message to every node, Waku v2 adopted libp2p GossipSub for message dissemination.
Important clarification: In GossipSub, all nodes still relay messages, but the protocol optimizes dissemination to avoid duplication and reduce overhead. Waku achieves true scalability by combining GossipSub with sharding, which splits the network into smaller subsets. While many nodes may subscribe to all shards, sharding helps reduce bandwidth requirements across the network.
Waku v2 also introduced modularity. Instead of being a single monolithic protocol, Waku became a family of protocols tailored for different communication needs:
Relay – efficient message broadcasting via GossipSub
Store – offline messaging with store-and-forward
Filter – lets light clients only receive relevant messages
RLN (Rate Limiting Nullifiers) – spam resistance while preserving privacy
Lightpush – allows light clients to push messages without running a full relay node
SDS (Scalable Data Sync) – enables efficient synchronization of structured data
This modular design gives developers flexibility. Whether building a real-time chat app, notification system, or DAO coordination tool, Waku v2 provides the right building blocks.
The Waku Network
Waku v2 powers the Waku Network, a communication service network that integrates multiple Waku protocols into production-ready infrastructure.
The Waku Network leverages RLN protection to ensure spam resistance while maintaining privacy. By running Waku nodes, developers and users contribute to a censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving communication layer for Web3.
Why Waku Matters
Whisper was the first bold attempt at decentralized communication, but scalability limited its impact. Waku builds on that vision, evolving it into a practical, modular, and production-ready protocol family. With the Waku Network live, developers now have a strong foundation to embed secure, censorship-resistant messaging into their dApps.
Get Started With Waku
If you’re building in Web3, now is the time to explore Waku:
👉 Check out the Vac RFCs to dive deeper into protocol specifications.
👉 Explore the Waku Network and learn how you can run a node.
👉 Install the Waku SDKs – js-waku for JavaScript/TypeScript, or nim-waku for Nim-based implementations.
👉 Experiment with integrating Waku into your dApps for messaging, notifications, or coordination.
👉 Explore example apps – check out waku-examples for hands-on demos like chat apps and pub/sub messaging.
👉 Join the developer community – follow discussions, ask questions, and stay updated on new RFCs via Vac’s RFC hub
Decentralization is not just about money – it’s about communication, too. Waku is making that vision real, you can go through the official docs here for more research/technical depth.
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