[Deliverable] Review Waku MVP

[chair28980]

Based on customer interviews and co-design sessions, identify the Waku USPs with most potential and outline an MVP.

Based on Waku’s current state and roadmap, review if additional deliverables to fill technical gaps (if any) are needed, or what currently planned deliverables must be completed.

Communicate with targeted customers on MVP.

[fryorcraken]

https://www.notion.so/Waku-MVP-1838f96fb65c8039acabf8a6a1e689e7?d=1848f96fb65c806fadd6001c391e5de3#1838f96fb65c80e183a8c04d7033ebd5 (internal)

Redacted version (project names removed).

Waku MVP

Based on Validation Tracking matrix and our conversations with various potential users/customers, we see the following areas that we need to focus on

Accessibility

• Harden bootstrap: We have experienced fleet issues for websockets connections - in simple terms, they were maxxed out, so new edge nodes could not connect and hence discover other peers to use and connect - this means we need to harden bootstrap process for edge nodes.
• Examples: Verify out process for maintaining and updating examples - they must be maintained up to date with clients versions and they must work (e.g. ).

SDKs

• Go - main focus is Status and status-go
• Rust - multiple prospects asking for Rust (as a de-facto standard for new web3 projects) - REDACTED - these are essentially blocked by Rust SDK not being available and will divert to a different solution (custom p2p network based on libp2p, centralized server) in its absence. REDACTED already did that, but is willing to come back. The Graph uses old Rust bindings** based on go-waku and would be willing to use RLN and other new features with new Rust SDK
• NodeJS - there has been uptick in inbound projects trying to use js-waku in nodejs. (e.g. REDACTED, Railgun, REDACTED)
• Messaging API - projects (especially inbound leads) tend to generally understand why each protocol (Relay, LP, Filter, Store..) is necessary, but often have a hard time combining them all together to arrive at expected reliability, latency and privacy.

Use Cases

There are a few use cases that come back regularly and would be worth focusing on and building PoCs/libraries for

• signalling - use Waku as a private and decentralized way to exchange control messages among a group of users/nodes to establish direct connections for higher bandwidth/lower latency - this is currently generally handled by a centralized server or service like Firebase - projects like REDACTED, gaming, a few apps integrating voice-chat functionality would benefit
• No-infra P2P - projects often want to focus on business logic over infra (hence the popularity of the cloud), Waku (Network) offers existing decentralized infra
• Waku Sign - decentralizing wallet signing infrastructure would be important for many projects which now rely on centralized alternatives. Previous interest came from REDACTED The latest discussion happened during Devcon with REDACTED folks.

Take Aways

• Review bootstrapping of edge nodes, especially for the browser
• Prioritize a Rust SDK over NodeJS once bindings are ready (ie, integrating in Status apps)
• Message API work will be beneficial both internally (Status) and externally
• Working examples over documentation