MOVED TO BLOG.WAKU.ORG DRAFTS
This post is part of a series focusing on Waku's features. The goal is to help developers understand how they can leverage Waku for their own applications and projects.
Waku incentivisation and marketplace protocols are a work in progress, this article aims to lay out a vision, potential future, and solution; however, research may lead us to a different path. The content of this post should not be interpreted as promises or guarantees.
Waku’s goal is to provide protocols and software to enable private censorship-communication, first and foremost for chat applications, but generalised enough to be useful for other use cases. The integration of Waku in the Status chat application, RAILGUN private DeFi system, TheGraph indexer network, and Portrait micro-websites demonstrates that Waku is on track to become a generalised p2p communications network.
However, each project currently still needs to run a set of service nodes to support its users. There is a missing piece to making Waku decentralised for censorship-resistance: The Waku Service Marketplace.
From a developer’s perspective, one can view Waku’s end game in the form of an SDK with a three-step developer experience:
(1) is already possible today, and we are planning work in 2025 to make it even easier for developers to use Waku by implementing a simpler Messaging API for Golang, Rust, and JS (Browser), as well as providing out-of-the-box end-to-end reliability features.
(2) is driven by the need for decentralisation, removing the necessity for projects and developers to run nodes or any kind of infrastructure for Waku-based apps to work.
Such a model aligns with our principles. If projects or the Waku team have to run infrastructure to ensure the network works, then it is clearly not decentralised, and hence not censorship-resistant .
Beyond censorship-resistance, there is the matter of inclusivity and the challenges brought by running infrastructure in the web2 world: contract agreements and availability bound to a project’s jurisdiction, need for physical data centres for true sovereignty, and unfair pricing models by top players, as demonstrated by the rise of decentralised alternatives.
However, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay for Waku infrastructure. The question is, who and how?