Comparing Waku and libp2p

Since Waku is built on top of libp2p, they share a lot of concepts and terminologies between them. However, there are key differences between them that are worth noting.

Waku as a service network

Waku intends to incentivise mechanisms to run nodes, but it is not part of libp2p's scope. Additionally, users or developers do not have to deploy their infrastructure as a prerequisite to use Waku. It is a service network. However, you are encouraged to run a node to support and decentralise the network.

Waku as a turnkey solution

Waku includes various protocols covering the following domains: privacy preservation, censorship resistance, and platform agnosticism, allowing it to run on any platform or environment.

Waku provides out-of-the-box protocols to enable mostly offline/resource-limited devices, Store/Light Push/Filter caters to those use cases.

Economic spam protection

libp2p does not have strong spam protection guarantees, RLN Relay is a protocol being developed by the Waku team towards this goal.