Development roadmap
Waku v1 is in production and was quickly adopted by the Status Mobile application. Yet, this initial version was unable to handle the scale required to support popular applications, prompting the v2 rewrite. Waku v2 has seen encouraging initial adoption beyond Status by projects such as Railgun's private transaction system and The Graph's indexer communication network Graphcast.
Given Waku v1's scaling difficulties, the team behind Waku is primarily focused on ensuring v2 scales securely. By the end of Q3 2023, we aim to support one million users.
Meanwhile, the team is also working on ensuring production readiness alongside network and development sustainability. Though work on these areas is already underway, our efforts will intensify as we progress toward our million-user-milestone. Finally, Waku aims to promote itself among developers looking to add decentralised communications to their applications.
Secure scalability
Alongside Vac researchers, Waku is producing and implementing various RFCs to define the protocols and application guidelines required to serve more than one million simultaneous users. We then aim to study Waku's capacity through network simulations before designing and implementing scalability risk-mitigation strategies.
Production readiness
We will consider Waku v2 production ready when it's performant, stable, and bug-free while satisfying user requirements. This process will involve collaboration with Status teams to test the protocols, as well as further simulations to assess future updates' expected performances. Ensuring that Waku has adequate protection against spam and DoS attacks is critically important to this milestone.
Network sustainability
Many of Waku's core value propositions (privacy and resistance to censorship, for example) are reliant on its decentralisation. While our most passionate users may well operate network infrastructure altruistically, incentivization mechanisms will ensure a wider node distribution, and strengthen Waku's disruptive properties.
This process will involve defining a viable incentivization structure via RFC and studying its efficacy to tweak parameters through test net simulations, before implementation on the main net.
Development sustainability
We believe Waku will only realise its true potential if its community and users believe in its longevity. As such, Waku's development must remain funded. Again, arriving at a suitable funding mechanism will involve several RFCs to define how much of the network's extractable value can be diverted toward R&D efforts.
Growth
After achieving the above milestones, we will be in a position to aggressively market Waku to potential contributors and developers within the web3 sector and beyond. As a piece of public goods infrastructure, we encourage the wider community to help improve the protocols by contributing to our R&D efforts.
Promotion is an ongoing process that is already underway, involving conference attendance and sponsorship, hosting developer workshops, producing promotional material, and appearing on industry-focused podcasts.