Future issues for Waku - Githubissues

oskarth commented 4 years ago

Rough roadmap for Waku. To be filled out in more detail as work progresses.

Project goals

The primary goal is to fix the immediate bandwidth scalability issues with Whisper. See Fixing Whisper for great profit for background and rationale.

Secondary goals are:

Ensure our already forked version of Whisper is documented enough to allow others to use the protocol, most immediately status-nim. Aside from new waku mode node modifications, this includes existing light node modifications, mailserver protocol, and additional packet codes.
Increased ownership of our own existing protocol stack for Core, with iterative improvements and allowing for protocol upgrades. This includes future iterative improvements such as moving to libp2p, accounting for resources, settlement, alternative spam resistance solutions (zkSNARKs?), alternative routing (pss?), remote log usage, etc. If we do this right, culturally moving from waku/0 to waku/1/2/3 will be more efficient than trying to get whisper/v7 EIP accepted.

Teritiary goals are:

Improve our way of working together and increase accountability, with a more focused group of stakeholders, closer-to-implementation research and research sprints.

Very rough. The goal should be to get waku in a state that it is ready for the [Status] app on the order of a few/some weeks (4-6?).

Separate protocol that is backwards compatibility with Whisper/v6 and works through console-client/status-nim-tests
Fork of EIP627 and our modifications (packet codes, light client, mailserver) and new waku mode in own spec as draft

Specs moved over to Vac and good enough to enable e.g. Nim/Go client interop; rate limiting and resource accounting draft
Nim and Go clients working in isolation with waku mode as well as with its own kind (nim whisper6<>nim waku; geth whisper6<>nim waku)
Preparation for enabling it in app as an option

Cross-client working
Specs in Vac in solid state and publicly available/reported on; clear problem isolation on next medium term steps (libp2p, pss, zksnarks, settlement etc)
Integration into app
Handover to Core; reflection point to see if it makes sense to continue as a separate team and where additional enhancements should lie / fit into other research work

oskarth commented 4 years ago

oskarth commented 4 years ago

Brief update: latest state re Waku here https://vac.dev/waku-update

More general roadmap to come. Keeping this issue open for now as it has some pointers for future improvements.